Blatant Homerism: ESPN is ready to suck the life out of college football
The first 12-team College Football Playoff kicked off last weekend with a frosty showdown in prime time between in-state rivals Indiana and Notre Dame. By halftime, it seemed clear the Hoosiers had little chance of prolonging their surprising season. When all was said and done, the Fighting Irish’s dominant win left talking heads questioning the wisdom of putting IU in the field in the first place.
It became a common theme as the opening round played out. When Penn State smacked down SMU on Saturday, the chorus of complaints about the field grew louder. The criticisms got a boost from the sport’s most visible broadcast analyst when Kirk Herbstreit of ESPN took to the airwaves to rip the CFP selection committee. He argued that the people doing the rankings focused too much on how many games teams won and not enough on who those teams played.
It felt like the moment when you realize a private equity firm is about to suck every last nickel out of a company and leave it for dead.
What Herbstreit and his ilk are really saying is that teams like SMU and Indiana made the 12-team field this season by virtue of fortuitous scheduling, and they’re not entirely wrong. Both teams lost only one game during the regular season, but they also avoided most of the top opponents in their conferences. SMU, for example, didn’t play Clemson, Miami, Syracuse and Georgia Tech. Indiana played seven teams that had losing records in Big Ten play and missed the likes of Oregon, Penn State, Illinois and Iowa. (In fact, had Indiana and Penn State faced each other in the regular season, one of them likely would have found itself outside the tournament by virtue of the fact that it would have picked up a second loss.)
The bloat resulting from conference expansion makes such scheduling artifacts inevitable. Of 19 potential conference opponents, for instance, B1G teams can only play nine. Some teams are going to end up with overwhelmingly favorable draws by necessity. Indiana took advantage of its good fortune this season. In the coming years, programs like Northwestern and Purdue could play that same role.
Herbstreit is essentially asking that we tacitly agree to give the selection committee an override button to keep the riff-raff out and put the bigger names in. In other words, the committee can swap out an Indiana or SMU for an Alabama simply by virtue of believing the Crimson Tide are better. After all, most people who follow the sport would predict Alabama to win in a hypothetical matchup against SMU or Indiana. You could even draw a parallel between the “eye test” approach Herbstreit is pushing and the selection committee’s decision last year to bump out an undefeated Florida State squad that lost its starting quarterback late in the season.
Coincidence or not, Herbstreit’s position on this matter just so happens to match the maximal position for his employer’s bottom line. If you asked ESPN’s executives which of those programs produce more valuable television programming, there’s no doubt the Tide would roll. (As would LSU… and Florida… and Oklahoma…)
And box office is what this is truly about for ESPN. Maybe Herbstreit really believes teams like Bama and Ole Miss should get a shot at the national championship over teams like Indiana and SMU. But we do know that ESPN prefers broadcasting competitive games between marquee brands. One way to get more of what it wants: Putting up a velvet rope at the door to make sure helmet schools dominate the field.
Eventually, this same type of rationale will spin up as a pretext for splitting off a few dozens of the college football’s biggest programs to form their own new division – with the backing of broadcast partners. But we don’t need to go any further down this rabbit hole to recognize that ESPN’s posture towards college football seems to get more predatory by the day.
Not so long ago, the Worldwide Leader in Sports appeared intent on treating CFB like a growth business. The network started marketing CFB in earnest as a national television product to cash in on the sport’s unrealized economic potential. The newest iteration of the postseason represents the culmination of those efforts.
However, that doesn’t mean ESPN has a vested interest in college football remaining a going concern. It’s possible the network’s strategy for extracting value from its CFB media rights deals will score big in the short run and turn disastrous over a longer time frame. Those broadcasting deals with the conferences have expiration dates for a reason.
Picks and Recs: Best movies of 2024
It felt like the movies I saw this year reflected the ways in which new technologies and growing efficiencies in the flow of information flow are impacting the film industry. Capital seems to be better at finding its way to worthwhile projects and – perhaps more importantly – steering clear of truly awful ones. Meanwhile, filmmakers can work faster and with better tools at their disposal than ever before.
So I wouldn’t call it a great year for cinema, but I’d say what I encountered was consistently good. I haven’t seen as many of the films that are popping up on end-of-year lists as I had hoped, but here are my five favorites from what I did catch (in no particular order).
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
It sounds like nobody else went to see this on the big screen, which is unfortunate. The Fury Road prequel boasted unbelievable cinematography and stellar performances by Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth. I’ll be pretty bummed when George Miller stops making movies.
Rebel Ridge
I’m a sucker for the underestimating-the-unassuming-badass genre.
Monkey Man
The vibrancy of the setting sets this movie apart from similar projects. Also, who doesn’t love a good fight scene in a commercial kitchen?
Longlegs
This probably got overhyped as a game-changer for the horror genre, but it was still legitimately scary. One hundred minutes of ominous tension.
A Quiet Place: Day One
This one stuck with me for the way it celebrated the power of kindness and accepting fear as a natural part of our lives. The guy who played Eddie Munson in Stranger Things (Joseph Quinn) is having a hell of a year.