As first reported by the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the South Eastern Conference announced today a megadeal with ESPN that will ensure that SEC games are broadcast nationally, consistently, for the next 15 years.
The deal, which will will pay the SEC a fucking ridonkulous $2.25 billion, trumps the deal announced last week regarding CBS' contract, worth about $55 million per year through the '23 season, and is also fucking INSANE.
Don't get me wrong, the SEC deserves every single penny of this. And, like a fantasy team manager concluding half-way through the season that it's pointless to try and compete for stolen bases by continuously picking up perennial suck asses like Willy Taveras or (cringe) Juan Pierre, I think it's time that the other conferences just went ahead and focused their attention on sports that don't matter: namely, baseball, basketball, swimming...pretty much anything but football because it's not even close.
And why wouldn't you want as many SEC games televised on your network as possible? When your conference schedule is loaded with incredible match-ups damn near on a weekly basis, well, then I guess you'd be the SEC instead of whatever crappy conference of which you are a part. Or maybe you're not a part of a conference at all. Thanks to some astute research by georgiasportsblog, this would theoretically give Mississippi State and Vandy (about $15-17 million per year) a more lucrative deal than Notre Dame (currently $9 million per year). So all of you non-SEC fans out there who are sick and tired of us always resorting to bashing other conferences at parties, never paying attention to any out of conference non-bowl games, and never calling girls from other conferences after drunken hook-ups, do you see? Do you finally understand now? Perhaps the endless flood of pics (SFW) showing how much more beautiful our southern lasses are isn't enough. Multiple championships year after year, not enough. Slamming Ohio State in a national title game 3 times in two years, still not enough. But now the SEC Snobs out there have two and a quarter billion reasons to talk even more shit about your lousy conference, so prepare yourself now. There's nothing like a little cold hard cash to serve as proof of SEC dominance, absolution for SEC elitists. Hold a tick...isn't SEC elitists redundant?
There are several advantages and perhaps a few disadvantages to this deal. Advantages include a butt ton of money and even more visibility for the conference, increasing our recruiting, presumably. One especially advantageous advantage of the deal is that we no longer have to sit trhough 35 minutes worth of "What is wrong with Notre Dame this year? They are 0-5 and don't look to be improving!" coverage when all we want to see is some highlights of two top-20 teams. ESPN is notorious for stroking their own tail, so to speak (read: arena football, X-Games, etc.), providing copious amounts of wide-ranging coverage to highlight their own programs. This includes specials on Outside the Lines, promotions ad nauseum, increased visibility on Top 10 plays and so on.
The only advantage one may come up with is, as with all things including ice cream (trust me on this one), too much of any good thing is, always, a bad thing. Overexposure will get a lot of people in America sick of the SEC. And, once SEC (just the football now, our institutions are already world renounced) is solidified as a global force, more of a corporate brand than merely an acronym encompassing the greatest schools in the nation, the SEC may lose some of its appeal.
Take it from someone who has watched SEC games on Raycom year after year: it was terrible. When the camera was actually trained on the football, which was at best 3/4 of the time, the footage was grainy and jumpy. It was like someone filming a natural disaster or something. The replays were even worse. I can't tell you how many times the Raycom announcers led into a replay, only to discover they didn't even have the camera trained on the play.
But this was all part of the appeal, to be honest with you. Our own little southern football, crappy network and all. It was charming in a way. But I am not worried about losing our charm. SEC football is about more than just the highest level of college football on television and whooping other teams' asses. It's about pageantry. It's about tradition. And the tradition-drenched SEC will never lose it's appeal for that reason...it's built on ideas, rivalries, colors and superior attitudes that have been developing for hundreds of years.
I said hot damn I can't wait for football to start.
The deal, which will will pay the SEC a fucking ridonkulous $2.25 billion, trumps the deal announced last week regarding CBS' contract, worth about $55 million per year through the '23 season, and is also fucking INSANE.
Don't get me wrong, the SEC deserves every single penny of this. And, like a fantasy team manager concluding half-way through the season that it's pointless to try and compete for stolen bases by continuously picking up perennial suck asses like Willy Taveras or (cringe) Juan Pierre, I think it's time that the other conferences just went ahead and focused their attention on sports that don't matter: namely, baseball, basketball, swimming...pretty much anything but football because it's not even close.
And why wouldn't you want as many SEC games televised on your network as possible? When your conference schedule is loaded with incredible match-ups damn near on a weekly basis, well, then I guess you'd be the SEC instead of whatever crappy conference of which you are a part. Or maybe you're not a part of a conference at all. Thanks to some astute research by georgiasportsblog, this would theoretically give Mississippi State and Vandy (about $15-17 million per year) a more lucrative deal than Notre Dame (currently $9 million per year). So all of you non-SEC fans out there who are sick and tired of us always resorting to bashing other conferences at parties, never paying attention to any out of conference non-bowl games, and never calling girls from other conferences after drunken hook-ups, do you see? Do you finally understand now? Perhaps the endless flood of pics (SFW) showing how much more beautiful our southern lasses are isn't enough. Multiple championships year after year, not enough. Slamming Ohio State in a national title game 3 times in two years, still not enough. But now the SEC Snobs out there have two and a quarter billion reasons to talk even more shit about your lousy conference, so prepare yourself now. There's nothing like a little cold hard cash to serve as proof of SEC dominance, absolution for SEC elitists. Hold a tick...isn't SEC elitists redundant?
There are several advantages and perhaps a few disadvantages to this deal. Advantages include a butt ton of money and even more visibility for the conference, increasing our recruiting, presumably. One especially advantageous advantage of the deal is that we no longer have to sit trhough 35 minutes worth of "What is wrong with Notre Dame this year? They are 0-5 and don't look to be improving!" coverage when all we want to see is some highlights of two top-20 teams. ESPN is notorious for stroking their own tail, so to speak (read: arena football, X-Games, etc.), providing copious amounts of wide-ranging coverage to highlight their own programs. This includes specials on Outside the Lines, promotions ad nauseum, increased visibility on Top 10 plays and so on.
The only advantage one may come up with is, as with all things including ice cream (trust me on this one), too much of any good thing is, always, a bad thing. Overexposure will get a lot of people in America sick of the SEC. And, once SEC (just the football now, our institutions are already world renounced) is solidified as a global force, more of a corporate brand than merely an acronym encompassing the greatest schools in the nation, the SEC may lose some of its appeal.
Take it from someone who has watched SEC games on Raycom year after year: it was terrible. When the camera was actually trained on the football, which was at best 3/4 of the time, the footage was grainy and jumpy. It was like someone filming a natural disaster or something. The replays were even worse. I can't tell you how many times the Raycom announcers led into a replay, only to discover they didn't even have the camera trained on the play.
But this was all part of the appeal, to be honest with you. Our own little southern football, crappy network and all. It was charming in a way. But I am not worried about losing our charm. SEC football is about more than just the highest level of college football on television and whooping other teams' asses. It's about pageantry. It's about tradition. And the tradition-drenched SEC will never lose it's appeal for that reason...it's built on ideas, rivalries, colors and superior attitudes that have been developing for hundreds of years.
I said hot damn I can't wait for football to start.
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