Life Lessons with Prof. Carroll

Here’s pete teaching a life lesson, oh wait, he’s shilling a book for money, my mistake

As all of you know now Reggie Bush has given up the good fight and has returned his Heisman trophy before a bunch of old rich guys in New York could demand that he give it back.  He has insisted for years now that he never violated any rules and that his family magically got an half million dollar house in SoCal and it didn’t come from a booster or one of the dozens of other methods that USC uses to pay its players.

Smelling the stinky winds of change blowing in from the NCAA offices Pete Carroll got the hell out of Dodge last year and took the NFL job up in Seattle as quickly as he could.  Knowing that the northwest is totally chill like SoCal, just a little rainier he heading 700 miles north to bring his rah rah attitude to those rain logged hipsters up on the north coast.

Since Reggie wasn’t smart enough to mail his trophy to his cousin in Grand Cayman and and then just claim he was on vacation for all of 2005 and he didn’t know anything about no stinking Heisman he had to get as ahead of a 5 year old story as you can and give it back ASAP.  Since Carroll was intimately involved, he was of course asked all about it.

Among the many stupid meaningless things Carroll said about the situation was that “It would be a learning opportunity for Bush.”  Since Bush is no longer “an amateur” no longer has to deal with the hypocritical NCAA and probably isn’t up for any more Heismans I was wondering exactly what learning he was going to do from this, so I’ve put together some ideas.

1. Get the hell out of town before any sanctions hit and never look back letting your successor and recruits deal with your mess.
2. Taking money for playing college football is way worse than any performance enhancing drugs or on field cheating.
3. It’s also more immoral than fraud and murder and has worse consequences from the NCAA.
4. Don’t be too blatant with the money you take from boosters, stick with cars and girls not houses.
5. None of this will affect your pro-career at all, so fuck it.

Good thing Prof. Carroll could go out of his way to present us with these life lessons.  Between the sanctimonious bullshit about student athletes you get from coaches and school presidents to the over burdened and rule centric NCAA it’s almost unbearable to even watch college football these days.  If I didn’t have a certain affinity for my Utah Utes from years of being within a couple miles of the school and going there for like 6 years I’d be done with it today.  Boy it’s a long step down from my soap box, maybe an NCAA employee can help me down, they are used to doing that.

Independence and Economics at BYU

Don’t ever Search for cougar and money on Google                           

I think that at this point the discussion of BYU leaving the MWC is nothing but a matter of economics spurned on by their closest rival Utah bolting to the PAC-10.  It has been reported that the PAC-10 will be paying Utah around $15 million a year after they become full members of the conference.  BYU received $1.3 million per year from their current deal with MWC conference due to their incredibly lucrative tv deal on The Mountain.

If any of you have not seen The Mountain it is about one step above public access and probably not any better than BYU’s own station BYU TV, which is integral to this project even being possible for the Cougars.  I don’t think without the fact that not only does BYU run it’s own station, but also has a fully equipped HD broadcast studio on campus that this would be even possible.

To me the process would work much like the Big 10 or Big 12 network deals.  BYU gets cable companies to carry their station, which can be broadcast in HD to as many areas that have a high number of Mormon or if they exist non-Mormon Cougar fans.  This would carry the bulk of their sports programming and bring in ad revenue along with whatever they could get the cable companies to pay them, probably 10 cents per subscriber at the top end, if anything.  This would of course force BYU TV to change their listing with the FCC from a religious non revenue earning station to a commercial station.

The second move would be to work their own deal with ESPN and other national carriers on showing specific match ups in Football and Basketball and receiving revenue from that.  With the on site capabilities it may prove more likely that national stations would want to broadcast from BYU, saving the cost of brining their own equipment and uplink systems.

There is little doubt that BYU could not get over $2 million in contracts through these methods.  The real problem then is does this allow the football program to grow?  Can they get the matchups they need to be ranked high enough to have a chance at a BCS or even national championship?  Since it’s obvious that they won’t get special considerations like Notre Dame.  Also, is there a way for them to squeeze the MWC for a bigger cut of the revenue form other sports and just leave in football, or make independent TV deals, throw their weight around like Texas, since they are the big player in the MWC now.

I love nothing more than conferences being shaken up and the BCS being affected, I am hoping things get worse before they get better in college football.