NCAA Division 1-A football stadiums (bandwidth warning)

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Egan
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Re: NCAA Division 1-A football stadiums (bandwidth warning)

Post by Egan »

Glad to see you are safe albakiwi...

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Re: NCAA Division 1-A football stadiums (bandwidth warning)

Post by IanRitchie »

so i can safely say that after having stood in the middle of the pitch inside a packed bowl stadium, that kind of design is a bit fantastic.

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Re: NCAA Division 1-A football stadiums (bandwidth warning)

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more info! which bowl?

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Re: NCAA Division 1-A football stadiums (bandwidth warning)

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vanderbilt stadium for a concert. feels like the entire crowd is on top of you, and because there aren't any breaks for tiers it's a wall of people.

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Re: NCAA Division 1-A football stadiums (bandwidth warning)

Post by Boba Fett »

IanRitchie wrote:vanderbilt stadium for a concert. feels like the entire crowd is on top of you, and because there aren't any breaks for tiers it's a wall of people.
U2 gig I take it? That was one colossal stage setup...

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Re: NCAA Division 1-A football stadiums (bandwidth warning)

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seeing as this is the de facto, CFB thread, here goes. Miami finds itself embroiled in possibly the biggest scandal that the sport has ever encountered. Take your time reading through the allegations. It'll make the St Kilda fans out there feel a whole lot better about things:

http://sports.yahoo.com/investigations

summary for the dr;tl crowd:
In 100 hours of jailhouse interviews during Yahoo! Sports’ 11-month investigation, Hurricanes booster Nevin Shapiro described a sustained, eight-year run of rampant NCAA rule-breaking, some of it with the knowledge or direct participation of at least seven coaches from the Miami football and basketball programs. At a cost that Shapiro estimates in the millions of dollars, he said his benefits to athletes included but were not limited to cash, prostitutes, entertainment in his multimillion-dollar homes and yacht, paid trips to high-end restaurants and nightclubs, jewelry, bounties for on-field play (including bounties for injuring opposing players), travel and, on one occasion, an abortion.

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Re: NCAA Division 1-A football stadiums (bandwidth warning)

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Why do these rules exist? What's the point of what is effectively a college salary cap?

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Re: NCAA Division 1-A football stadiums (bandwidth warning)

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It's a partly an equalisation policy, and partly a philosophical position. What the NCAA wants to acheive is all universities recruiting (and retaining) players on the merits of their academic reputation and the reputation of the football program. They're also ideologically committed to amateurism and the student-athlete ideal.

From the NCAA's perspective, there can be no outside influences beyond football and academics that can sway a player's decision to attend one university over any other.

But this bumps up against an inherent tension because college football is awash with cash and surrounded by thousands of wealthy fans who would do anything to assist their teams recruit if they knew they wouldn't get caught. College football is probably the only sport in the world where the players receive $20k worth of services for playing but the coaches can earn $5m or more to watch over them.

The NCAA really has no strategy to prevent corruption. They just deal with issues as they arise (eg/ programs dobbing each other in, media investigations or cops stumbling across corruption that spills into football).

It's a fukn mess. But there's 120 teams in the top tier and still plenty of clean-ish football to watch every spring.

What would happen if they abandoned the benefits rules? The arms race would swap from coaches salaries and stadiums to cash, coke and hookers. That would be dissapointing for this stadium nerd but every program would be like SMU in the early 80s and Miami in the 80s and 2000s and that would be spectacular.

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Re: NCAA Division 1-A football stadiums (bandwidth warning)

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See the movie Blue Chips if this interests anyone.

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Re: NCAA Division 1-A football stadiums (bandwidth warning)

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Opening day...

Image

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I think they got a bigger crowd for the Spring scrimmage than the game against Kent State (above)

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Re: NCAA Division 1-A football stadiums (bandwidth warning)

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Libra flur stadium with wings

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Re: NCAA Division 1-A football stadiums (bandwidth warning)

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There's a rash of conference realignments happening at the moment and it's getting out of hand - the dominant conferences are feasting on the young, the infirm and the unwary.

Texas A&M is bitching and moaning about Texas getting its own television network and desperately wants to SECede from the Big XII.

Syracuse and Pittsburgh just jumped ship from the Big East to the ACC.

Nebraska started it all by leaving the Big XII for the Big Ten last year and is currently playing its first season as the 12th member of a very badly named conference.

Colorado also left the Big XII for the Pac-10 which re-named itself the Pac-12 because it also picked up Utah from the Mountain West Conference.

Anyway, all these moves are just the beginning of what appears to be the development of a small clutch of "super conferences" (essentially baby NFLs). A lot of people aren't thrilled at the idea of a new layer of haves and have nots on top of the existing Div I, II, and III structure and the fact that realignments are going to create winners who are in top leagues by virtue of history rather than commercial merit.

Anyway, I like the two following articles because they dig a little deeper than the standard commercial analyses:

http://bravesandbirds.blogspot.com/2011 ... alert.html
Nerd Alert

If you haven't figured it out yet, I like numbers. I get annoyed when mainstream sports analysis either dismisses statistical analysis as the province of nerds who never put on pads or uses the wrong numbers to try to make a point. Part of what is great about sports is that results can be quantified and compared, so we have have a more rational discussion about the best college football team in a given year as compared to the best movie or TV show. That said, there are limitations to statistical analysis. As SABR afficianados will tell you themselves, the appropriate use of stats is to complement scouting, not to replace it. Ideally, the numbers tell us what our eyes are already communicating. If a number seems totally out of whack with reality, then it is time to question the number.

That is exactly what is going on with Nate Silver's attempt to quantify the size of college football fan bases. I love Silver's writing on politics and baseball, but you can tell from his post that he is not a college football fan. If he were, then he would know that he needs to go back to the drawing board when his methodology produces a conclusion that Georgia Tech has 1,664,088 fans, while Georgia has only 1,098,957 fans.

Anyone who follows college football in this market (and according to Silver's number, Atlanta has more college football fans than any other city in the country, save New York, which is a very confusing argument for the "Atlanta is the worst sports town in America" crowd) immediately knows that this number is wrong. Georgia sells out every game in a 90,000 seat venue, regardless of opponent. Georgia Tech struggles to fill a 50,000 seat stadium unless the opponent brings fans. Georgia has a fan base that will make massive donations in order to have the right to buy tickets; Georgia Tech has to offer ticket packages to get casual fans in the door. Georgia's student body is twice as big and the Dawgs also command lots more support from residents of the state who never went to college.

So how does Silver make his mistake? Look at his inputs. First, he is looking at the top 210 TV markets. In Georgia, that covers Atlanta, Savannah, Augusta, Macon, Columbus, and Albany. That leaves a lot of the state unmeasured. The list of TV markets linked by Silver puts the population of those six cities at about 3.6M in a state of over 9M people. If I were to start surveying people in Cordele, Dublin, or Luthersville, I'd guess that I'd find a lot more Dawg fans than I would Tech fans. College football is a very popular sport in rural areas, so Silver is missing out on a big piece of the sample by looking at TV markets.

Working from only a portion of the pie, Silver then relies on Google search traffic and an online survey of college football fans to divide up the 210 TV markets. It's here that Georgia fans' stereotype of Tech fans as computer geeks really kicks in. As my friend Bob shouted at some Tech fans during our unsuccessful attempts to scalp tickets to the 1999 Tech-Georgia game, why don't you download yourselves a beer! Silver is doing the best he can to use publicly-available data so as to replicate the sort of market analyses that the major conferences are doing in making realignment decisions, but there are holes here. Any online measure of fan support is going to skew urban and white collar. Maybe that's how you end up concluding that Miami has a bigger fan base than Florida State. Silver does try to limit the damage by including revenue information, but again, this will tend to favor a fan base like Georgia Tech's that is small and wealthy. It's a compliment to Tech as an institution that it produces successful graduates, but it is a limiting factor when we are trying to look at the number of eyeballs watching the Jackets play North Carolina and the Dawgs play Tennessee. Likewise, Silver's methodology will tend to overrate the size of Auburn's fan base and underrate the size of Alabama's because there are a bevy of Harvey Updykes out there who don't live in urban areas and don't respond to online surveys, but instead express their love of the Tide by amateur efforts at horticulture and then by calling the Finebaum Show to brag.

The last point to be made here is that Silver is looking at the size of fan bases as being the dominant factor in realignment. There's no doubt that demographics matter, but there are other considerations. Take branding as an example. The SEC is the best college football TV product for a variety of reasons, one of which is that the games are played in stadia packed with fans screaming their heads off for three hours. That intensity comes across on the tube. I wrote about this issue during the winter in making an analogy between what the English Premier League has achieved worldwide and what the NHL could learn from the EPL:


Tim Vickery made a great point on the World Football Phone-in a few weeks ago regarding coverage of futbol in Brazil and the point applies to the NHL. He was talking about the discussions in England regarding whether the new tenant of the London Olympic Stadium, either Spurs or West Ham, will tear out the track when one of the clubs moves in after the Olympics. In the process of making the point that having a running track kills the atmosphere for a match, he said that Brazilian TV companies can't get enough of the English Premier League in large part because the atmosphere is so good. The fans are screaming and singing the whole time and significantly, they are close to the action, so the cameras can pick up the facial reactions of the fans when goals go in.


Vickery's point has applicability to the NHL, specifically as an illustration of yet another way in which Gary Bettman has got things all wrong. He expanded hockey throughout the Sunbelt because of the size of the markets here. In the process of doing so, he reduced the value of the NHL as a TV property. Hockey already struggles on TV because it's hard to follow the puck. The sport needs to make up for this shortcoming in other ways. One such way is passion from the fans. Hockey fans tend to be screamers, especially in places where the game has deep roots. Leaving aside the fact that I live in Atlanta and want our city to have an NHL team, what is going to be more appealing to an average viewer: a playoff game in a beautiful, but somewhat sterile arena in Atlanta or Nashville or the same game played in front of crazy fans who live and breathe the game in Quebec City or Winnipeg? The NHL already has something of a spectacle problem by virtue of iconic franchises leaving their great old arenas for new, less interesting venues. (Chicago, Montreal, Toronto, and Boston all come to mind; Hockey Night in Canada just isn't the same without Maple Leaf Gardens. Now, if you'll excuse me, there are some kids on my lawn who require shooing.) The league adds to the problem by moving its product outside of its sweet spot.
Apply this reasoning to the SEC potentially adding West Virginia as team 14.

West Virginia is a small, rural, poor state. In terms of eyeballs, it is not worth adding. However, if you imagine the scenes when Alabama and Florida go there for games, you can see the SEC adding to its EPL-style brand. Hell, just watch what happens when LSU arrives this weekend. Now, the question that Mike Slive & Company have to be asking themselves is whether their brand really needs cementing. Isn't the SEC going to be the same, outstanding TV product without West Virginia? Maybe, but there has to be a way to figure out the value of further salting away the perception of the SEC as the best TV product for fansanity.

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Re: NCAA Division 1-A football stadiums (bandwidth warning)

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We know realignment is the worst. It is this awful game of prospecting, data-crunching, and sports business reporting dropped into the middle of your season. Alabama plays Arkansas this week in the game where, for the third year in a row, we vaguely hope for someone to move the ball on Alabama without the benefit of an injury. Oklahoma State plays Texas A&M at Kyle Field in what will be a zillion points and thousands of swaying psychopathic young people stacked three decks deep. Florida State goes to play our new combo-breaker and linguistic marvel Dabo Swinney at Death Valley. LSU goes to West Virginia for a night game. Lunacy will be the norm this weekend, and we're all in obstructed view seats because of realignment just slapping girders in our field of vision.

The SEC has invited Missouri to be its 14th member according to Matt Hayes of the Sporting News. That's fine: Missouri is at least geographically contingent, has a solid football program, and according to our sources has fans fond of demanding an offensive coordinator's firing in the stands. That kind of hatred and irrationality is a calling card of the SEC, and thus seems compatible on one important level.


The SEC also seems content with staying at 14 teams, a move that passes for discretion now, but on that issue of branding: we cannot overestimate how important the notion of identity and intensity is for a sports league. You can say that West Virginia, for instance, lacks academics, even if it's in the neighborhood with some existing conference members in terms of academic rankings. You can justifiably cite television market numbers, and population studies, and yes, even the dreaded brand recognition surveys regarding their spread.

You can also suggest something equally important to a conference's succes: that West Virginia, like many existing conference members, has a value that can't be quantified in households and eyeballs in a particular geographical area. Michael leans heavily on the parallel of the EPL there, and with reason. Despite fielding teams from some places that could easily be called the Oxford or Lexingtons of England, the EPL thrives off televising a product that people most of all want to watch because it is the EPL, and is therefore guaranteed by brand to be more colorful and more entertaining than its competitors.

The Big Ten, SEC, and EPL all thrive off this brand durability. Texas A&M does nothing to water down the lunatic devotion that is part of the SEC's appeal, but if the 14th team is Missouri, then we only have one question: when you think of MIssouri football, do you think of burning couches, and insane devotion, and of cameras panning a sea of bourbon fumes and howling hoi-polloi while an announcer lets the roar do the talking for them? Despite the tv eyeballs, are any of them watching with a gun in their hands, ready to shoot the tv if the defensive coordinator they want fired so desperately appears on the screen, and thus makes them shoot the thang for its tarnated insolence?

We are being deliberately cartoonish, but that is the one thing we in all seriousness do not know about Missouri: if they fit the brand on a sentimental level, and would indeed at their worst lengths poison trees to seek vengeance on a rival. This sounds unimportant, but it's not tax breaks that make Texans so Texan; it's the concept of the Alamo, and boots, and a fondness for brisket over pork, son. Old Trafford makes Manchester United to the eyes of a kid watching in Singapore, just as the Swamp's beaming orange walls and glaring heat make it so hellish even when viewed by a spectator watching it half a continent away.

We know West Virginia had this, at least. They would go to all of these extremes including tree poisoning and beyond in the name of amor sportis, and would then quite possibly set that rivalry tree on fire just to finish the job. As nice a chunk of puzzle piece as Missouri is, there's one side of the West Virginia puzzle that fits so well here, other sides and shapes be damned. Thus some sadness at their exclusion, and a mournful playing of "Country Roads" while standing next to the embers of some woeful and incinerated couch made of dreams and all-too-flammable artificial fibers.

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Re: NCAA Division 1-A football stadiums (bandwidth warning)

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By 11 a.m., a haze of smoke hung over the campus quad in Tuscaloosa. About 1,200 tents filled the 20-acre stretch of land, which is split on its north end by the library and navigable by a series of concrete paths. A group of university facilities workers, each with a full bag of trash in hand, worked to fill another. This was twice the amount of tents they had ever seen, and still, this was just the beginning. In a few hours, they said, the paths would be at a standstill.

Cell phone service was gone by noon. The word was that 250,000 people had come into town, and the towers were overloaded. Bryant-Denny Stadium holds about 102,000, but tickets were around for those willing to spend. On University Blvd., a "City of Tuscaloosa Licensed Ticket Reseller" had a set of four in the upper deck. A father and son stopped to ask. "For all of 'em, twenty-four forty-four," he said. The father smiled and moved on.
more:

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/720 ... iggest-day

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