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I find it massively irritating that in a week when a young woman was randomly gunned down by militant thugs who protect a theocratic, repressive regime, Michael Jackson’s death will be bigger news, not just locally to the United States, but Globally as well. Japan may never recover. In normal conversation, I’ve a tendency to point out what I don’t like about people, not individual persons, but people in general. It’s a habit that’s managed to keep me out of a lot of friendly conversations. And right now, I find myself bristling at the way “The King of Pop’s” image is splashed across the front of the Tribune this morning, and how Charlie Gibson let us know, on Good Morning America, that “we are united in mourning.”
We are not united in mourning. I don’t mourn the man at all. If Dickens was right about the afterlife, then I’ve a feeling Michael is finding it tough to moonwalk this morning, weighed down as he is with the sins he waged on this earth, but I’ll grant that perhaps his chains are not as long or heavy as one might guess, because misery may beget genius, and genius can beget madness, and this sort of genius would probably tear anyone apart. One can only guess at its genesis.
The Roundup:
You’ve already heard that Chris Martin has gone soft on his verbal to Notre Dame. You’ve also already heard that Fauria is out for the summer and fall due to “personal reasons.” Life has taught us little, but one thing it likes to teach us again and again is that bad news comes in threes. The last 2 seasons total loses: 9 and 6 - each divisible by three. See what we mean? Oh, and 9 + 6 = 15… also divisible by three! What are the odds of that!?
So with that in mind, we ask all you Chicken Littles out there…
What will the 3rd bit of Bad News be for the Irish?
Loading …We’ve been almost impossibly busy this offseason, so much so that the start of the season approaches us in a way that makes us question our personal experience of time and whether or not Einstein was a little confused about what is or isn’t possible. And so there are a number of things we’d been meaning to really hammer away at whilst standing upon this pulpit, and we’ve manage to do very little of that. But this Monday, Holly, the girl who blogs about football, brought up that Nick Saban is talking tough about putting ND on the Alabama football schedule while the 2 athletic departments involved are wondering how to fit that in between games against Louisiana-Lafayette and WSU and reminded us of something that really, really needs to be addressed:
I have been to games in Tuscaloosa (my favorite road trip), and in South Bend. And with that in mind, let us just offer a humble suggestion here for all our friends at NBC Sports when the home-and-home rotates to the Midwest: Bring extra camera crews for the action in the stands. You will get more out of this culture clash than out of an extra hour of Jay Leno every night. The atmosphere at your typical Notre Dame home game is staid enough to make the key-jangling, down-in-front Michigan fans look like the bloody-minded Cajuns of LSU, and the first time a liquored-up Bammer gets into a physical altercation with an elderly Domer usher for refusing to cheer at a lower volume, or sit down so others behind him can enjoy the game*, or remove his underwear from his date’s head, by Touchdown Jesus do we ever wanna see it in HD.
Holly further illustrates her point of view on the ND stadium “atmosphere.”
As a child of perhaps ten years old I was ordered to take my seat during a game by an usher at Notre Dame Stadium, so that the fans behind me would not have to stand. At a football game. I have never fully recovered from this.
We assume that the girl who blogs about college football is not 12, and is at least 19, or 25 if she’s like an average Tennessee grad just now making it in the real world. Which means that her first poor experience in the stands that Rock erected was at least a decade ago and the absurdity that is the “energy” level at ND stadium on an average day has been allowed to thrive (?) at ND since at least 1999. It’s a shame and a crime against the sport itself.
All of this, of course, will devolve (after passing through “home game scheduling sucks” and “what has the team done to get excited about”) into great debate about how so-and-so’s 85 year old grandfather, 1st among 3 generations of ND grads in the family of O’Shaugnewhatever, has every right to sit in the stands and expect, having purchased a ticket, to be able to sit in the seat. And we’ve no argument there. He has every right to sit in those seats. But I’m reminded by my 2nd taking of business law where the professor once said, “The right to remain silent is just as important as the right to run your yapper.” See? 2 seemingly mutually exclusive rights can live in harmony, and so I propose that those of us who have not spent a lifetime smoking, those of us who can show up to a game in 65 degree weather sans winter parka and hot chocolate, and those of us who wish to risk brain aneurysm due to over-vocalizing of support for the team have every right to expect to be normal, enthusiastic college football fans when they purchase a ticket. Further, they have every right to completely ignore the existence of the seat for which they purchased a short-term lease.
This is a tired fight. It’s a fight that may not end until certain people die and others (ahem, Cappy) retire. But it’s a fight that, every once in a while, must be fought, and we hope that the generation or two of graduates and students younger than ourselves will take up the torch in this cause and light a few fires.
Yeah, okay, so we’ve decided to be sell outs. We’ve added advertising to the site. For the 4 of you who read the blog with regularity before this year, you can now moan and groan to all your friends who only recently started reading us and have conversations like this:
Friend: “Hey, have you heard about that amazing Notre Dame football blog, HerLoyalSons.com? They’re incredible! So smart, so witty, so good looking! And funny! And they don’t just cover ND Football either. Yeah, they cover lots of national stuff too, just with a pair of blue and gold glasses on while they do so! They’re fantastic!”
You: “Oh. HLS? Yeah, well, I liked their old stuff, back before they started making money and became sellouts.”
And the reason you now get to look so cool to all of your friends is this: The economy, stupid. We at HLS have been thrilled that people actually visiti and read the site. However, with actual visitors comes actual costs - costs we’ve been paying ourselves for quite a while now, but costs that cost real money which could otherwise go into our children’s trust college fund. And the way the economy is going, “college fund” is quickly looking like we can call it by another name every week: Mega-Millions Lottery.
So here’s how we’re going to play this: We’re going to keep the ads to an absolute minimum. We’re not out to make money on this thing. We’re going to start with one strategically placed ad and watch it for a while to see how it’s performing, and then we’re going to adjust from there if need be, either in number of ads, ad placement, or ad mix. While some of us have experience trying to “monetize” much larger sites with much more aggressive advertising schemes, we have absolutely no experience in this bohemian-I’m-okay-you’re-okay-let-someone-else-pay-but-just-barely-world, so please just be patient and know that we’re doing our best.
Thanks,
HLS Management
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There is just nothing happening of any interest today. Maybe I’ve missed something, but there’s just nothing too interesting going on. Everything on the ‘net is looking back 30 years at something none of us care about anymore or laughing at things coaches said on Twitter. And given Iran is actually managing to get more interesting as the week has gone on, and North Korea is going to launch a missile towards Hawaii (or Brazil, if you keep drawing that line), my motivation for aggregation of retrospectives on Barry Switzer is low. So enjoy Friday, and if you see something interesting, feel free to link it in the comments.
Clay Travis, a man of such depth that his bio on his personal website begins…
Clay Travis is the only former student manager in the history of college athletics to marry an NFL cheerleader. He managed to pull this off despite an irrational affinity for the television shows Dawson’s Creek and My Super Sweet 16.
Thinks that the financial situation of Notre Dame and its football program will eventually force ND to go and join a conference. (Link if you really want to bother.)
In all the talk about whether Notre Dame should stay independent, few of the points of discussion ever focus on the financial ramifications of their decision. I think that’s because most fans incorrectly assume that Notre Dame has already maximized their financial standing. That line of thinking is a vestige of the 1990 NBC contract that was truly monumental in scope. But since that time, cable television has proliferated to such a degree that 24 or so hours of programming over the course of a Notre Dame football season just isn’t that big of a deal. Not when you compare it with hundreds of hours of conference programming for networks, such as ESPN, with many platforms of distribution and hours and hours of content to fill. This isn’t just an opinion, the ratings reflect that college football fans are voting for conference affiliation with their eyeballs, they watch the average Big Ten and SEC game on ABC/ESPN and CBS, as noted above, much more often.
What does all of this mean? Notre Dame’s television revenue is going to continue to fall relative to the Big Ten and the SEC. If Vanderbilt and Northwestern aren’t already ahead of the Irish, which I think the numbers prove they definitely are, another couple of years of increasing television money will erase all doubts. This will continue all the way up through 2015 when Notre Dame’s newest extension with NBC runs out. By that time, the financial ramifications of Notre Dame’s independence will have become more apparent to everyone. The Big Ten Network will be thriving, throwing off cash to the 11 member institutions. ESPN, the Big Ten, and the SEC will be smoking big cigars as the ratings gold pours in from their deals.
And, mark my words, Touchdown Jesus will stick out his palm. Yep, at long last the Fighting Irish will be begging for a piece of the Big Ten pie.
Pokes and prods at Touchdown Jesus by a Vanderbilt grad aside, the actual content of his article isn’t all that interesting. Any ND fan who’s paid attention actually knows what’s going on with the BCS deals, the NBC deal, etc… And any ND fan who thinks beyond the depth of an episode of Dawson’s Creek for a moment might pick up on a key number in Travis’ opinion piece: 59.8 million bucks, the total revenue generated by ND Football in 2008.
There are things not considered by Travis while he sort of flippantly glosses over that number, most notably: size of the institutions on his linked list of revenue generation by football programs. Hey, here’s a list (with a bit of number variation) of top football revenue generation programs, plus a column I like to call “total enrollment.” (Source) Which of these teams is not like the others?
1. Texas - $72.95 million - 49,697 students 2. Georgia - $67.05 million - 33,959 students 3. Florida - $66.1 million - 50,912 students 4. Ohio State - $65.16 million - 51,818 students 5. Notre Dame - $59.77 million - 11,603 students 6. Auburn - $59.67 million - 23,547 students 7. Michigan - $57.46 million - 40,025 students 8. Alabama - $57.37 million - 23,838 students 9. Penn State - $53.76 million - 42,914 students 10. LSU - $52.68 million - 31,934 students
For those of you named Clay Travis, here’s the point of that list with the 3rd column added: Notre Dame is about one half the size of the next smallest school on that list of top-10 revenue generating football programs. And Notre Dame also still appears in the top 20 of total endowments. But the point isn’t, “hey! Look how wealthy ND is,” Travis. The point is ND is unique because they can be unique. They are unique because they choose to be unique. The university’s mission demands it. Oh sure, we’ll allow that there are fathomable circumstances that could force the university into seeking to join a conference in the future, but those circumstances wouldn’t be as simple as what Clay Travis presented in his opinion piece. I wont hold my breath waiting for Travis to investigate those possible circumstances with any depth.
Update: It’s been pointed out that I - as often is the case - left the reader with the job of inferring my point rather than actually spelling it out, so here it is. At ND’s size, with ND’s brand power (which isn’t going to just disappear, no matter what those like Clay Travis may wish), and with ND’s mission, the fact that it sits among lists like top-10 in football revenue generation and top-20 in endowment size means that it need not navigate the waters of college football the same way the institutions like Texas, rife with “satellite campuses”, must. In fact, the very act of thinking and acting like “everyone else,” cough-Kevin-White-cough jeopardizes that which makes ND unique. Working in a realm without the restraints and trappings that nearly every other competitor must work with actually gives ND a major competitive advantage - an advantage that must be nurtured. Travis, within his opinion piece, declared winners and losers in a race that will continue in perpetuity. It was foolish, it was hostile, and it can only be explained as an attempt to generate ad revenue for his bosses with a cheap parlor trick. Travis predicates the entire piece on the notion that ND will “feel” threatened and worried over the fact that NU and Vanderbilt will, for a shot time anyway, make more money from TV deals than ND. It’s an entirely baseless notion that he props up with the tired, “everyone else would be worried if it were them” argument.
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What will the 3rd bit of Bad News be for the Irish?
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