Dr. Saturday and College Football Talk used an insightful Blutarsky post as rationale for revenue sharing between the rich and the poor of college football.

Why should we care about revenue sharing? Because it helps competition. And that is a good thing. At least according to Dr. Saturday.

Dr. Saturday writes, “At least half of Division I games are not only not competitive, but have virtually no chance of being competitive given the huge disparity in resources. This isn’t good for business or pleasure.”

The SEC would beg to differ as it counts its money from the new CBS and ESPN contracts. The current state of college football has been very good for business. Why fix what isn’t broken? And record revenues indicate the product isn’t broken.

As for pleasure, there is a certain charm to clubbing seals, or hosting helpless teams. If competition was all that mattered, why schedule cupcakes for homecoming?

Besides, if you put everyone on a level playing field then you wouldn’t have the joy of a David beating a Goliath because everyone would be Davids. John F. Kennedy could never have asked the question in one of his moon speeches, “Why does Rice play Texas?”

Revenue sharing works in the NFL, as Dr. Saturday calls it “the most successful socialist model in world history, because that model serves the product — competition.”

However, you have to ask why it worked in the NFL—the value of each pro franchise derives from its ability to play other professional teams. George Will explained that in a August 12, 2002, column on baseball’s revenue problems.

Will writes, “To buy a team is not to buy an entitlement to all dollars generated by games in that market. Rather, it is to buy an association with MLB. All revenue streams of all teams flow from that association.

“As Clark Griffith (of the old Washington Senators family) says, suppose a store sells baseball caps with four different ornithological emblems: a Cardinal, an Oriole, a Blue Jay — and a Goldfinch. The first three will sell much better than the fourth, and the value of those three derives from their association with MLB.”

It is easy to make the case in MLB or the NFL that each team depends on its association with all other members of the league.

But is that true for college football? Is the value of Alabama Crimson Tide football based on the competition within all Division 1 teams? No. Of course not. The value of Alabama’s program depends far more on its conference than on the 100 other Division 1 teams it doesn’t play.

Would Alabama football be less valuable in 2010 if it played only SEC schools and not national rival Penn State?

It might seem that way, but no. The value of the University of Alabama derives from more local sources. You could have Alabama play itself and 92,138 would show up to view it. (While the spring game isn’t a real example, the point is that you could line Alabama up against high school teams and the fanatics would show up to view the decapitation.) But, Alabama’s greatest boost to value comes from its association with the Southeastern Conference.

If the SEC left the BCS and the NCAA to crown its own champion via its own playoff system, it wouldn’t harm local enthusiasm—or local revenue. Would CBS or ESPN eschew SEC football if every week the SEC featured all conference games instead of a few Division I-AA (or whatever the hell the NCAA calls it now) cupcakes? Isn’t winning the SEC tantamount to winning the national title anyway?

Revenue sharing makes no sense in college football because of the diffuse and yet equally regionalized nature of the sport. Millions of fans support their teams today—what good would it do to tax the 92,138 Alabama fans to support all three UAB fans? How does it help Alabama’s bottom line? In the NFL, you can show a real benefit due to the highly interconnected nature of the league. The SEC has its own form of revenue sharing every year. It helps every team’s bottom line. Until someone can show that revenue sharing for all of Division 1 college football would help every team (and that includes the power conference teams), it is useless chatter—more useless than Das Kapital.

4 thoughts on “Revenue sharing is a bad idea for college football”

  1. I not only don’t like and do think that revenue sharing is a stupid and cockamamie idea that no doubt has been fostered and nurtured by the have nots to get their hands on money they haven’t earned and damn sure don’t deserve; but as far as I’m concerned the facist, socialists at the NZAA have already introduced far, far too much revenue sharing in the cloaked form of parity induced by scholarship limitations and assinine recruiting regulations, While it’s true that the majority of these rules were passed by votes of the member institutions you have only to look at the makeup of the voting body, (which is a huge majority of the have nots) to understand why rules that help them and piss off the haves are continuously being passed. This country was formed with the intention to give any man who wants to bust ass and work for it, the opportunity to be successful. But there are no guarantees for that success. No one is obligated to help and in our society should not be. Help is individually voluntary. (Unless you prefer socialism or worse.) I say take all of the old division 1 schools, dump the NZAA and leave them with their pets, and start a new College Football organization. This was begun about 20 years ago in the form of the CFA, but lost steam mainly because the chickenshit Big 10 and Pac 10 didn’t support it fearing damage to their precious Rose Bowl. Still during the brief time it existed it kept the honcho’s at the NZAA awake at night. If this country keeps following its current direction it’s going to be the worlds only socialistic democracy which will be the begining of its end! Screw the NZAA, parity and revenue sharing. We don’t need em! RTR!

  2. Oh and I agree with the original post. This is a blood lust country. A beheading several times a season is what everybody wants. You know – 36-0! LOL! RTR!

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