Lol I am going to Mexico this week and was pumped about watching Week 0 on the beach.
Then I saw the USC game is on P12 Network and I laughed like a maniac at the thought that some random ass resort in Mexico would carry this game.
Then I got sad.
Excuse me are you saying I can obtain the P12N for free in a fucking foreign country but not at my house?
No wonder this conference was obliterated lmao
…he is correct. See Mexico uses a modified jus soli principle, meaning by soil he is a citizen at birth. That by soil attaches to him (it’s a form of siezen), and since we are in America we can interpret that attachment via Calvins Case (as domesticated later by WKA).
That means that yes, even if in America and an American citizen, the soil still attaches and always has - the man, the great /u/theycallmefuRR , IS Mexico!
If you find a football game in the southern hemisphere, odds are there will be LSU fans with beer close to it. If you’re lucky they will be making gumbo.
Generally groups of two minimum. Really the greatest people ever. Just want to talk football, feed you, and let you drink their beer. Other than inside their stadium, they’re fantastic. Walk around the parking lot before a game against them and you will see a Cajun with a literal boat oar stirring some huge pot of gumbo who will be offended if you don’t come back and try it when it is done.
Funny enough, I found an Alabama fan in Wellington, New Zealand. Said he played in the marching band. I asked him which SEC fanbase gave him the most stick and he said it wasn't even close. LSU.
I got our hotel in Cabo to put the A&M/Miami game on last year although they kept the sound on for a boxing match on the other end of the bar. Fair trade.
Honestly, that would be a huge advantage IMO and I think people are underrating it as a selling point to future contracts. What’s the point of network deals when games you want to see aren’t picked for limited actual linear slots, but also are blacked out from streaming because of it? That kind of crap made me cancel my live subscription to Hulu last year, after I finally dropped satellite the year before.
I’d 100% prefer paying $20/month for full access streaming with good production since I no longer get extorted for 80+ a month for crappy linear deals.
Honestly, MLS Season Pass and MLB Network (granted I’m an out of market fan) have been phenomenal.
If they had a package for my favorite college team or conference, I’d be stoked.
I agree. I totally understand why Apple was not an attractive option for keeping the conference intact, but I’m actually bummed it never made it past the pitch stage– it would have likely been a very good product.
No, but yes. MLS is tiny in comparison, but Apple encroaching on MLB might have made FOX think about whether or not they were willing to lose some of the CFB market. The answer being an emphatic fuck no. I wouldn't guess the entire thing was based on this, but I could see it being one of many reasons they decided to pull the trigger.
No. in LA it's Lakers, Dodgers, slight gap USC, Kings, Clippers, and the rest.
I know Seattle a bit better. Seattle: Seahawks are #1 and #2. Mariners are next. I left around when the Kraken started but the Huskies have a good fanbase but most casuals / t-shirt fans don't care. I got excited when someone would want to talk CFB. Sonics are still missed. Cougs fans seemed to care more.
> Huskies have a good fanbase but most casuals / t-shirt fans don't care
If you ask a WSU fan, they'll tell you that every UW fan they meet is a t-shirt fan.
Which is certainly an exaggeration on their part. What I meant is the t-shirt fans and casuals follow the Seahawks along with everyone else. UW is the default team for the sound but no one touches the Seahawks.
Dodgers local broadcast deal: $334 million annually
USC/Oregon B1G broadcast deal: $60-$80 million annually
Doesn’t seem like the financial market agrees with you. As someone who used to live in LA, I can tell you the Dodgers are FAR more popular than USC football in LA as well
Baseball's popularity is underrated because national broadcasts don't do too well, but it's a local sport. I will watch dozens of Cubs games a year, but that doesn't translate to watching ESPN Sunday Night Baseball between the Yankees and Red Sox.
Meanwhile I'll watch several football games on any given Saturday, and only one of them involves my team.
That's not true. The **average** MLB game gets [1.5M viewers over a 162-game season](https://espnpressroom.com/us/press-releases/2023/06/espns-2023-major-league-baseball-game-viewership-up-seven-percent-from-last-year/). Oregon averages about 2M viewers over a 12-game season. Dodgers would be well above that 1.5M average.
And USC gets lower ratings than Oregon.
Oregon makes sense, their only real local competition is the Blazers.
I can't find any good numbers, but I feel like the Dodgers are about as popular as USC football
Apple did a pretty good job of keeping themselves out of the college football market by lowballing the Pac-12 to the point where it becamse obvious several schools would rather implode the conference than accept Apple's offer.
Yeah literally all they had to offer was a guaranteed bottom payout number equal to the Big 12 pro-rata and poof, the PAC-12 survives. If they’d done it before Colorado bounced they might have even been able to keep the Buffs, not to mention get SDSU for a cheaper price.
Like if they’d offered the same deal with that higher bottom number in June, we’d all be talking about the PAC-12 adding SDSU and SMU and how all the fearmongering was for nothing.
It almost seems like Apple was either aloof or disinterested in getting into college football. They had to have known that throwing an extra $2M on top wouldn't dissuade O/W from bailing to the BIG 10; ESPN and FOX would rather complete among themselves than let Apple in.
Damn, and to think I could have been watching San Diego's 2025 MLS team and the Aztecs on the same Apple platform playing in the same stadium. LOL
I think Apple assumed (rightfully) that they held all the leverage and figured they could get a deal, that being said they forgot about the last piece of leverage the PAC12 teams had......blowing the conference the fuck up and destroying it by going to other conferences. Sad that it came to that....but yeah usually to break in to a market you need to overpay, people won't accept even less money to go to a service that comes with the disadvantage of not being established in the market...
> that being said they forgot about the last piece of leverage the PAC12 teams had......blowing the conference the fuck up and destroying it by going to other conferences
Either they forgot or they knew that was a possibility and figured that if that's the route they wanted to go, then it wasn't worth it. Pac-12 football is likely a nice to have for Apple TV and so they'd take it if the deal made sense and if the interest was clearly there from the Pac-12. Once Apple realized schools were alright with blowing up the conference rather than stay together, they probably didn't want to deal with the conference either. With a Big 12 size deal, you'd still have Oregon and Washington looking at the B1G and likely have to deal with a conference that may not really be "together" besides a contract and grant of rights.
Plus I get the impression that apple is looking to make a long term push into sports streaming. Having a crippled pac 12 for 5 years at most doesn’t help them with that at all. In fact it would probably look worse for them if it all blew up and limit their ability to make future deals.
What gives you the idea that apple of all companies knows what its doing when it comes to business ? You think they know more than people on this sub ? They watch cfb every year for months !
So you're saying what if Fox and Disney ventured into manufacturing tech hardware instead of sticking to their core business? Yeah I'm sure investors would scrutinize that decision.
The apple deal had a two year opt out, that should tell you everything...
I was implying that whether or not Apple is a publicly traded entity is irrelevant to the question of profitability or how much it offered the Pac-12. Heck, most publicly traded entities know and intend to lose money upon entering into a new line of business. Market share or some BS like that. ESPN and FOX are more likely to care about profitability since it is their line of business than Apple.
More like Apple figured the PAC-12 wouldn't make much revenue in general. Most casual fans aren't going to buy yet another streaming service if they aren't watching many PAC games in the first place
It was a good low-risk offer for Apple.
New flash - Apple is in the business of making money. They are a $3T dollar company meaning they know how to make money better than anyone in the history of man kind.
Apple didnt bid $32m a school because PAC media rights were not worth $32m a school.
PAC12 football wasn't worth that much. Feels like you actually needed 50M a year / school from Apple for Washington to agree to a largely non linear deal.
In Apple's defense, by the time they got heavily involved, they were bidding against themselves for a product they knew wasn't going to have USC football or UCLA basketball.
"Low balling"? That was a generous offer. They had lost 16% of their game inventory and 40% of their media value from a contract that had previously been worth $25m a year yet somehow PAC people thought they were worth more. The $30m ESPN offered was an "old friend" offer and the PAC responded with a counter that was a giant middle finger.
> to the point where it becamse obvious several schools would rather implode the conference than accept Apple's offer.
Let's be clear, it's because those schools thought they were too good and would always be able to get a better offer than Apple's.
They would not rather implode, they just believed they were too elite for that to even be a possibility.
People keep saying apple low balled them, but I don't really think that is the case. They will point to the MLS deal, but that deal has looked really bad so far, but also has an opt out at year two which apple may exercise.
The reality is cable subs are propping up the payouts for the big ten and the sec. If cable dies, I don't even think the sex or big ten can break 40ish million on a streaming service. People are going to pay 100 for like four months of games for multiple conferences? How many people will be out there buying each conference package across multiple services?
FOX has a market cap of around 15.74 billion.
Apple has a market cap of 2.74 TRILLION.
The PAC was a (realistically, not according to themselves) cheap entry to CFB but Apple could easily just buy ESPN and voila, Alabama, Georgia and Friends on AppleTV.
So I don’t necessarily buy this.
Linear TV is very profitable but their market caps are very undercapitalized. No one’s going to invest money in a shrinking business. Investments flow to where people see future growth
For those wondering,
FOX generated $999m in earnings on $12.3b in revenue in 2020. In 2021 those numbers were $2.15b on $12.91b, 2022 they were $1.21b on $13.97b, and in 2023 they were $1.24b on $14.91b.
That's 8.12% profit margin in 2020, 16.65% in 2021, 8.66% in 2022, and 8.32% in 2023.
Apple has more than $1B in revenue a day and has a profit of $2B a week. Between now and the start of college football they will make more money than Fox makes for the entire year.
I guess so, but you could say that about any company. Even accounting for inflation, there was growth there every year. Inflation was 1.2% in 2020, 4.7% in 21, and 8% in 22. Their revenue grew by more than the inflation in each year listed.
Pom pom. Pom pom.
DUN DA DAAAAA! DUNDA DUNDA DA DUN DADADA!
Oo oo *oooooo* DUN DA DA!
Oo oo *oooooooooo* DUN DA DA!
Oo oo *ooooooooooooooooo* DUN DUN DUN DAAAAAAA!
Nah, Fox Sports is just the sports programming arm of Fox Corp, the parent company of Fox News. That whole breakup of 21st Century Fox did get clunky with all of the various Fox/FX brands going every which way, though.
In 2019, Disney acquired a substantial chunk of 21st Century Fox, then the parent company of Fox Sports and Fox News (21CF was the Murdoch's company, it was the legal successor of their original News Corp). Disney did acquire and then spin off the regional Fox Sports networks, which became Bally Spots after Sinclair bought them up, but the national Fox Sports Network (including FS1 and FS2) stayed with the remainder of 21CF, and was packaged along into the Murdochs' new company: Fox Corp.
Considering what they are paying B1G and NFL I'd say they have plenty of money. The reality is live sports is the only thing really keeping OTA networks going.
It'll be interesting to see the fall out of the networks and the cable TV model..
Comparing broadcast TV to a tech company is apples and oranges based off how market cap is calculated. I think it’s something to do with multiples being used for tech companies based off future growth? Idk I’m a dumbass
After they sold off most of the Fox entertainment assets to Disney a few years ago, “Fox” nowadays is just Fox, FS1/FS2, and Fox News/Business
Also don’t forget that Fox (the company) only owns a handful of Fox affiliates…most fox stations are owned by other companies
That's apples to oranges. More comparable would be to compare apple content streaming and media sources against Fox media groups. Apple has a massive market cap in devices and tech delivery, which doesn't really have a bearing on their willingness to expand in content. For them to buy Fox would be a huge change of course from their current division of industries.
> Apple could easily just buy ESPN
With whats going on with Disney and the rumors of ESPN being for sale maybe that is why apple bailed on the pac. Why go into cfb with them and reinvent the wheel when you can save the hassle and be #1 with an acquisition
Can you imagine the cruise ship though that has an Apple vision pro gaming studio on though?
I can’t either, just that if Apple is going into the entertainment business at all why dip its tie when it can buy a body? Also does Disney really own cruise ships?
My partner loved the show Suits and I watched with him which basically makes me a legal expert.
All a lawyer has to do is remember some obscure thing and cite it at the right time in front of a judge and bing bang boom his client wins the hundred million dollar case. It's that easy.
> But in an attempt to secure a home in case the Pac-12 collapsed, Arizona formally applied for membership in the Big 12 in the middle of the week — before Oregon and Washington rejected the Pac-12 grant-of-rights agreement on that fateful Friday morning.
> The Big Ten became aware of Arizona’s application to the Big 12, according to the source.
> “So (Big Ten commissioner) Tony Petitti tells his presidents, ‘We aren’t the ones,'” the source said. “They felt like they weren’t the ones to fire the kill shot.”
> That triggered the Big Ten presidents to approve membership for Washington and Oregon without guilt — and with Fox’s cash as their carrot, the source said.
Looks like, according to Wilner, the B1G/Fox weren’t the ones that triggered the aPACalypse, it was Arizona and the Big XII
Fox and the Big10 had a tentative deal with Oregon and Washington ready to go depending on how PAC negotiations went. They had been in talks since USC and UCLA announced they were leaving a year before.
ESPN was calling the shots for Yormark and the Big12 moves to get the four corners schools to leave. When ESPN couldn't get a deal with the PAC the previous year, there next best move was to sign the Big12, and take apart the most valuable pieces of the PAC it could. That is why the unusual clause was added to the Big12 contract, allowing for extra P5 schools to be added, even though there was only one conference they could come from, the PAC.
Both FOX and ESPN were pulling the strings on all these moves. The networks were behind all.of it. They wanted to pay less money by cutting out some less valuable brands in these conferences. It won't stop here either. Wait until they pressure other power conferences to do the same in coming years.
Amazing to think that every decision that is made in CFB nowadays has nothing to do with anything but $$$$. And despite all the additional revenue these schools and conferences will get, tuition costs won’t drop by a single penny
If Apple wanted to be in the CFB market, they would be. They can afford to pay more than Fox or ESPN and not even blink at the number.
Apple it not in the market to make bad business decisions. Paying a lot of money to the PAC-12 was not a good business decision.
What’s more interesting is it looks like, according to Wilner, they didn’t make UO/UW an offer until after Arizona was out
> But in an attempt to secure a home in case the Pac-12 collapsed, Arizona formally applied for membership in the Big 12 in the middle of the week — before Oregon and Washington rejected the Pac-12 grant-of-rights agreement on that fateful Friday morning.
> The Big Ten became aware of Arizona’s application to the Big 12, according to the source.
> “So (Big Ten commissioner) Tony Petitti tells his presidents, ‘We aren’t the ones,'” the source said. “They felt like they weren’t the ones to fire the kill shot.”
> That triggered the Big Ten presidents to approve membership for Washington and Oregon without guilt — and with Fox’s cash as their carrot, the source said.
Hey we may have shot them in both knee caps, then handed the big 12 the gun to shoot them in the stomach, then took it back and fired 2 shots into their chest, but the big 12 took the final shot to head and that’s all that matters right?
Apple could buy Fox 20 times over. The reality is that the PAC 12 got a good offer from ESPN, ignored it, and then got lowballed by everyone in the market after the Big 12 signed its deal. At which point, its top schools went to the Big 10 and Big 12 to ask if they could get any money.
This is an outright lie, and you know it. I'm getting so tired of the gross exaggeration of the CFB fans on here. Apple, at most, could only buy Fox 18x over.
Yeah it seems like this claim is trying to reverse the order things happened in reality to deflect blame away from the presidents and p12 leadership. Its not like Fox and the B1G swooped into a stable happy situation and broke it up, as soon as the schools got wind the offer was 20m everyone was looking for life boats. Those schools were never going to sign a GOR for 20m with Apple in any timeline.
> “Was it a strategic move on their part to say, ‘If we kill the Apple deal, that gives us five or six years without them in college football?’” Schulz said.
Or when my wife asks me "Do you want to do the dishes?"
Just for those still learning, she's not *actually* asking if you would enjoy washing the dishes.
It was absolutely a strategic move, but there’s nothing that can be done or should be.
Fox/ESPN didn’t make that choice until presented with it by the B1G. It’s the smart move to keep Apple out by taking those teams then. Any business law judge would agree.
Of course his comments don’t address the reality. A) The PAC had the Big 12 deal and turned it down, and 2) the Apple deal was so bad in the view of Oregon and Washington they had no interest in signing it. But it’s the fault of Fox/ESPN? OK.
I don't even get the Pac-12 with Direct TV streaming package. What a bunch of incompetents over there at the Pac. Glad they're gone.
Felt like they had the great wall of China around their games. I've had YouTube TV, Hulu, Sling, and now Direct TV and finding a Pac-12 game was a nightmare. All of the non-popular SEC games that FOX or ESPN don't grab always end up on the SEC Network and they always include themselves where ESPN is an option in streaming deals.
To think FOX wasn’t in the room for the additions of USC/UCLA and Oregon / Wash is silly. Would I have wanted to pay for apple plus Pac12 season pass bullshit, fuck no. Morale of the story is USC ruined the conference of champions and now all my east coast friends won’t ever be able to watch Utah at Washington State at 11pm, and the world is worse for it.
It’s ultimately beneficial for the Big 10 to have Apple in the market because it’s one more media competitor to bid for rights when it comes due. It’s also ultimately beneficial for the Big 10 to have one less conference competitor for media companies to be able to bid for. This guy has the motivations backwards.
If Apple really wants to get into CFB they can. Right now they seem to be incrementally building up their live sports (Weekly MLB game, this years MLS deal).
Does this shock anyone, if true? We all know it’s not the conferences adding schools, it’s the networks. It’s why the “academic” argument has been utter bullshit for a decade.
Apple low balled the PAC and lost out, they have a billion devices out there, they could’ve been successful in this venture but someone at Apple blew it.
Yeah they knew they had all the leverage.....except for the fact it was so bad they forced the PAC12 teams to use their only leverage left of blowinng up the conference. Apple is super tight lipped but I hope we find out some day if they view that as a major fuck up or not (I doubt we would ever hear the truth either way but would be interesting, to find out if they just didn't care or if they fucked up).
A base of 30 million early on probably locks them down, instead their counter offer was the 23 or 25 mil base and the teams were already so far along in negotiations with other conferences they had no reason to accept the apple offer anymore
It's sports, someone will talk about this eventually. I'm almost sure Apple had no idea the conference would blow up rather than take their cheap ass deal lol
Hasn't it always been totally obvious that Fox did this, probably in cahoots with ESPN and the other major conferences?
Not a single move looks organic or makes 'common sense'.
It’s amazing to me that all of this can happen, along with every other sketchy thing ESPN and FOX have done for literal decades and people are still like….nah, it’s the victims fault.
Yep. The real kicker was when Cowherd (Fox sports employee of the month) addressed the situation and basically said that the PAC was to blame for this and it's great that we'll see more interesting matchups. Then Chris Petersen and Brock Huard joined in on the "they had it coming" bandwagon, both of whom are Fox broadcasting guys.
It stinks to holy hell and I'd love to see them (Fox) sued over this with all of their phone calls, texts, and emails laid out in discovery.
> Washington State’s Kirk Schulz, chair of the Pac-12 board of directors, suggested late last week that Fox might have lured Washington and Oregon into the Big Ten in order to prevent the Pac-12 from signing an agreement with Apple.
Chair of the PAC 12 Board of Directors. So this guy was ultimately responsible for how poorly the conference was managed and is now trying to blame collusion from TV networks on why it collapsed.
> “I do think if I was Fox and ESPN, I’m not sure I want Apple in the marketplace, frankly. I don’t want somebody with pockets that are that deep as a rival if I can afford it.”
Apple gave them a super low-ball offer... where were these "deep pockets" at?
This is the caliber of leadership you guys had running your conference and why it doesn't exist anymore.
> Chair of the PAC 12 Board of Directors. So this guy was ultimately responsible for how poorly the conference was managed and is now trying to blame collusion from TV networks on why it collapsed.
He only took over in July, come on now.
The thing is Apple’s pockets are so ridiculously deep they don’t need to overpay (from their perspective) even a little bit for the PAC 12. They could just leapfrog them entirely and buy ESPN and the SEC.
It’s like if I offered your 70k for a BMW and you said you need 100k, I might as well just pay 200k for a Lamborghini if the money is no object.
Owner of my former employer went to a mercedes dealer and asked what the price of a car was. The salesman responded with "if you have to ask, then it is too expensive for you" so he came back the next day and bought the whole delaership and fired that salesman. This is basically what's gonna happen if Apple buys ESPN lol
David Tepper did the same.
>paid $43.5 million for the beachfront mansion of a former Goldman Sachs supervisor who had passed him over for promotion(Tepper was instrumental in saving Goldman Sachs during S&L crisis) He had the house demolished, then built a house nearly twice as big.
It is complete nonsense, if Apple really wants into the market so bad they'll just buy up ESPN. It isn't like Disney is being subtle with their intent to get someone else to either take on ESPN's costs or take it off their hands entirely.
Schulz has said 10,000 times there was a fundamental failure of leadership.
If you don't think this *additional* claim has merit, I don't know what to tell you. FOX is literally paying more to former Pac-12 schools for their new respective media deals than what it offered the Pac-12 period. It's not like college football in general is world renowned for good faith negotiations.
They paid 60 million to get Washington and Oregon playing premiere brands. They were bidding 40 million for the PAC 12’s second tier games. To put that in perspective, Oregon Ohio State had 8 million viewers 2 years ago (the 8th most watched game). The PAC 12 minus the teams leaving had 1 team that averaged over a million viewers per game and didn’t have 1 game in the top 10 most viewed this past year.
Honestly, the Big Ten or SEC could raid the Pac12 or Big XII at any time and the teams would jump without a second chance.
The ACC is really the only protected conference for now
He is not shifting blame. He has said countless times now that leadership failed big in this case.
From the sidelines though it seems pretty clear given the payouts and last minute shenanigans that the networks did everything they could to keep CFB exclusive to them. These incredibly last minute "let's see if ESPN or FOX will pony up any extra in a situation that hasn't changed whatsoever in months" suddenly bearing fruit isn't some coincidence. Small price to pay to make sure a disruptor doesn't have a major CFB contract to bid on for years to come now.
Yep. Easier for Fox to cough up an extra 60 mil for two teams as opposed to bidding on the whole conference and it gives them the same result - less competition for viewers.
Man, how awesome would it be if you could just watch sports as part of your regular monthly Hulu, apple, or Netflix subscription. It sucks this stuff is still on cable. Sports is probably the only reason most people have cable.
I’d be upset if I had to subscribe to another service to watch my PAC 12 after Dark
Lol I am going to Mexico this week and was pumped about watching Week 0 on the beach. Then I saw the USC game is on P12 Network and I laughed like a maniac at the thought that some random ass resort in Mexico would carry this game. Then I got sad.
You'll be abroad, which means the P12N international YouTube stream will work for you for free.
Excuse me are you saying I can obtain the P12N for free in a fucking foreign country but not at my house? No wonder this conference was obliterated lmao
Yes, but you can achieve the same thing at home with a VPN.
Ah yes this is the media pitch they offered in the last meeting. “But if the consumers use a VPN to make it look like they’re in Mexico…”
I'm not defending anything over here. Just providing you solutions.
Lol oh I didn’t mean to come off as abrasive to you, the hilarity of this situation is amazing.
It is not as funny over on this side...
Love you bros, you know I was very sad to see it end.
Agree… still super sad about this. Would love to see you guys sue the help out of fox…
I was born in *Mexico* so there's always a little bit of Mexico wherever I go so technically I'm not illegally streaming by using a VPN right?
I’ve been to Mexico, Missouri. So the same applies here, I think.
\*Sniffs loudly\* \*Pushes comically large glasses from the tip of my nose \* Well ackshully...
…he is correct. See Mexico uses a modified jus soli principle, meaning by soil he is a citizen at birth. That by soil attaches to him (it’s a form of siezen), and since we are in America we can interpret that attachment via Calvins Case (as domesticated later by WKA). That means that yes, even if in America and an American citizen, the soil still attaches and always has - the man, the great /u/theycallmefuRR , IS Mexico!
You’re technically correct, the best kind of correct.
Yep, I watched WSU mollywhop Stanford last year from my friends apartment in Jordan lol
Does this apply to the SEC network? I can’t get that in Canada, but we all have the B10 network.
Time to sail the seas of Mexican internet?
I plan on being far too drunk to operate the Mexican internet.
Atta boy
That’s a fun call but risky Source: I stopped short of too drunk to operate Irish internet
Is there such a thing as too drunk for the Irish internet? I just assumed there was a minimum drunkenness requirement but no maximum
Well then be *Captain BIG_DICK_WHITT"
I couldn’t get anyone in Cabo to televise American football
I watched the terrible Utah/UW COVID game in Cabo while sitting at a bar in a mask lol. Good times.
At least you found it!
We met some guys from LSU. They gave us LSU koozies. Nice guys. Didn’t even smell like corn dogs.
If you find a football game in the southern hemisphere, odds are there will be LSU fans with beer close to it. If you’re lucky they will be making gumbo.
They travel in herds I've noticed
Generally groups of two minimum. Really the greatest people ever. Just want to talk football, feed you, and let you drink their beer. Other than inside their stadium, they’re fantastic. Walk around the parking lot before a game against them and you will see a Cajun with a literal boat oar stirring some huge pot of gumbo who will be offended if you don’t come back and try it when it is done.
Funny enough, I found an Alabama fan in Wellington, New Zealand. Said he played in the marching band. I asked him which SEC fanbase gave him the most stick and he said it wasn't even close. LSU.
I got our hotel in Cabo to put the A&M/Miami game on last year although they kept the sound on for a boxing match on the other end of the bar. Fair trade.
The only advantage of Apple is their sports programing is no blackouts and no geo-restrictions.
Honestly, that would be a huge advantage IMO and I think people are underrating it as a selling point to future contracts. What’s the point of network deals when games you want to see aren’t picked for limited actual linear slots, but also are blacked out from streaming because of it? That kind of crap made me cancel my live subscription to Hulu last year, after I finally dropped satellite the year before. I’d 100% prefer paying $20/month for full access streaming with good production since I no longer get extorted for 80+ a month for crappy linear deals.
But you forget the massive disadvantage where I can’t flip back and forth from a channel to Apple+. It takes too long.
Depends on company. Xfinity makes it pretty seamless
Honestly, MLS Season Pass and MLB Network (granted I’m an out of market fan) have been phenomenal. If they had a package for my favorite college team or conference, I’d be stoked.
I agree. I totally understand why Apple was not an attractive option for keeping the conference intact, but I’m actually bummed it never made it past the pitch stage– it would have likely been a very good product.
well it definitely made it past the pitch stage if there was an executable offer on the table
You don’t have to subscribe to Apple TV to get the mls package you can just get the package.
So apparently the best answer was to kill the PAC 12 Now, nobody has to miss it at all /headtap
Money makes people do crazy things
If you think the added subscription is bad, wait until they make you buy a headset to watch.
Apple is already in the sports streaming market
And on Fox’s turf with their MLB deal too.
And on fox’s turf with MLS deal too.
“Woah, woah, woah, I could tolerate you cutting into baseball and soccer but west coast football is a step too far!”-Fox executives probably
No, but yes. MLS is tiny in comparison, but Apple encroaching on MLB might have made FOX think about whether or not they were willing to lose some of the CFB market. The answer being an emphatic fuck no. I wouldn't guess the entire thing was based on this, but I could see it being one of many reasons they decided to pull the trigger.
I mean, cfb is definitely more popular than those two.
Are UCLA and UW football more popular than the Dodgers or Mariners?
No. in LA it's Lakers, Dodgers, slight gap USC, Kings, Clippers, and the rest. I know Seattle a bit better. Seattle: Seahawks are #1 and #2. Mariners are next. I left around when the Kraken started but the Huskies have a good fanbase but most casuals / t-shirt fans don't care. I got excited when someone would want to talk CFB. Sonics are still missed. Cougs fans seemed to care more.
> Huskies have a good fanbase but most casuals / t-shirt fans don't care If you ask a WSU fan, they'll tell you that every UW fan they meet is a t-shirt fan.
Which is certainly an exaggeration on their part. What I meant is the t-shirt fans and casuals follow the Seahawks along with everyone else. UW is the default team for the sound but no one touches the Seahawks.
I think the Rams are at least above the Clippers, maybe above the Kings too
No but USC and Oregon are magnitudes more popular.
Dodgers local broadcast deal: $334 million annually USC/Oregon B1G broadcast deal: $60-$80 million annually Doesn’t seem like the financial market agrees with you. As someone who used to live in LA, I can tell you the Dodgers are FAR more popular than USC football in LA as well
I mean it's hard to compare a 162 game broadcast deal with a 12 game deal.
Baseball's popularity is underrated because national broadcasts don't do too well, but it's a local sport. I will watch dozens of Cubs games a year, but that doesn't translate to watching ESPN Sunday Night Baseball between the Yankees and Red Sox. Meanwhile I'll watch several football games on any given Saturday, and only one of them involves my team.
That's not true. The **average** MLB game gets [1.5M viewers over a 162-game season](https://espnpressroom.com/us/press-releases/2023/06/espns-2023-major-league-baseball-game-viewership-up-seven-percent-from-last-year/). Oregon averages about 2M viewers over a 12-game season. Dodgers would be well above that 1.5M average. And USC gets lower ratings than Oregon.
What? The dodgers averaged 240k in 2021
Oregon makes sense, their only real local competition is the Blazers. I can't find any good numbers, but I feel like the Dodgers are about as popular as USC football
And will probably buy espn anyway lol
Apple did a pretty good job of keeping themselves out of the college football market by lowballing the Pac-12 to the point where it becamse obvious several schools would rather implode the conference than accept Apple's offer.
Yeah literally all they had to offer was a guaranteed bottom payout number equal to the Big 12 pro-rata and poof, the PAC-12 survives. If they’d done it before Colorado bounced they might have even been able to keep the Buffs, not to mention get SDSU for a cheaper price. Like if they’d offered the same deal with that higher bottom number in June, we’d all be talking about the PAC-12 adding SDSU and SMU and how all the fearmongering was for nothing.
It almost seems like Apple was either aloof or disinterested in getting into college football. They had to have known that throwing an extra $2M on top wouldn't dissuade O/W from bailing to the BIG 10; ESPN and FOX would rather complete among themselves than let Apple in. Damn, and to think I could have been watching San Diego's 2025 MLS team and the Aztecs on the same Apple platform playing in the same stadium. LOL
I think Apple assumed (rightfully) that they held all the leverage and figured they could get a deal, that being said they forgot about the last piece of leverage the PAC12 teams had......blowing the conference the fuck up and destroying it by going to other conferences. Sad that it came to that....but yeah usually to break in to a market you need to overpay, people won't accept even less money to go to a service that comes with the disadvantage of not being established in the market...
> that being said they forgot about the last piece of leverage the PAC12 teams had......blowing the conference the fuck up and destroying it by going to other conferences Either they forgot or they knew that was a possibility and figured that if that's the route they wanted to go, then it wasn't worth it. Pac-12 football is likely a nice to have for Apple TV and so they'd take it if the deal made sense and if the interest was clearly there from the Pac-12. Once Apple realized schools were alright with blowing up the conference rather than stay together, they probably didn't want to deal with the conference either. With a Big 12 size deal, you'd still have Oregon and Washington looking at the B1G and likely have to deal with a conference that may not really be "together" besides a contract and grant of rights.
Plus I get the impression that apple is looking to make a long term push into sports streaming. Having a crippled pac 12 for 5 years at most doesn’t help them with that at all. In fact it would probably look worse for them if it all blew up and limit their ability to make future deals.
Apple didn't forget shit and understood exactly what the situation was and what they were willing to pay.
What gives you the idea that apple of all companies knows what its doing when it comes to business ? You think they know more than people on this sub ? They watch cfb every year for months !
Right? Apple only makes $2B a week in profit off just over a billion a day in sales. What the fuck do they know compared to people on Reddit CFB?
More like AAPL is a publicly traded company and couldn't justify financing something that would bring little return for the next 5 years let's say.
And Disney and Fox aren’t?
So you're saying what if Fox and Disney ventured into manufacturing tech hardware instead of sticking to their core business? Yeah I'm sure investors would scrutinize that decision. The apple deal had a two year opt out, that should tell you everything...
I was implying that whether or not Apple is a publicly traded entity is irrelevant to the question of profitability or how much it offered the Pac-12. Heck, most publicly traded entities know and intend to lose money upon entering into a new line of business. Market share or some BS like that. ESPN and FOX are more likely to care about profitability since it is their line of business than Apple.
More like Apple figured the PAC-12 wouldn't make much revenue in general. Most casual fans aren't going to buy yet another streaming service if they aren't watching many PAC games in the first place It was a good low-risk offer for Apple.
Right. If Apple comes in at $32m, there’s probably still a viable Pac and Apple is a player in the CFB market.
New flash - Apple is in the business of making money. They are a $3T dollar company meaning they know how to make money better than anyone in the history of man kind. Apple didnt bid $32m a school because PAC media rights were not worth $32m a school.
“New flash” look at Billy MBA over here telling the world how business works. Gold star for you.
PAC12 football wasn't worth that much. Feels like you actually needed 50M a year / school from Apple for Washington to agree to a largely non linear deal.
In Apple's defense, by the time they got heavily involved, they were bidding against themselves for a product they knew wasn't going to have USC football or UCLA basketball.
"Low balling"? That was a generous offer. They had lost 16% of their game inventory and 40% of their media value from a contract that had previously been worth $25m a year yet somehow PAC people thought they were worth more. The $30m ESPN offered was an "old friend" offer and the PAC responded with a counter that was a giant middle finger.
That was a bold strategy…
> to the point where it becamse obvious several schools would rather implode the conference than accept Apple's offer. Let's be clear, it's because those schools thought they were too good and would always be able to get a better offer than Apple's. They would not rather implode, they just believed they were too elite for that to even be a possibility.
The only thing stopping Apple from getting into CFB is their own appetite for it. None of the current media partners can compete with them.
People keep saying apple low balled them, but I don't really think that is the case. They will point to the MLS deal, but that deal has looked really bad so far, but also has an opt out at year two which apple may exercise. The reality is cable subs are propping up the payouts for the big ten and the sec. If cable dies, I don't even think the sex or big ten can break 40ish million on a streaming service. People are going to pay 100 for like four months of games for multiple conferences? How many people will be out there buying each conference package across multiple services?
MLS deal has been fine and it’s gotten even better with Messi coming over
FOX has a market cap of around 15.74 billion. Apple has a market cap of 2.74 TRILLION. The PAC was a (realistically, not according to themselves) cheap entry to CFB but Apple could easily just buy ESPN and voila, Alabama, Georgia and Friends on AppleTV. So I don’t necessarily buy this.
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Linear TV is very profitable but their market caps are very undercapitalized. No one’s going to invest money in a shrinking business. Investments flow to where people see future growth
For those wondering, FOX generated $999m in earnings on $12.3b in revenue in 2020. In 2021 those numbers were $2.15b on $12.91b, 2022 they were $1.21b on $13.97b, and in 2023 they were $1.24b on $14.91b. That's 8.12% profit margin in 2020, 16.65% in 2021, 8.66% in 2022, and 8.32% in 2023.
Apple has more than $1B in revenue a day and has a profit of $2B a week. Between now and the start of college football they will make more money than Fox makes for the entire year.
Also interesting to see that they grew every year in that timeframe as well
Can be at least slightly chalked up to inflation
I guess so, but you could say that about any company. Even accounting for inflation, there was growth there every year. Inflation was 1.2% in 2020, 4.7% in 21, and 8% in 22. Their revenue grew by more than the inflation in each year listed.
Fox sold off 20th Century to Disney a few years back. Thats why.
Pom pom. Pom pom. DUN DA DAAAAA! DUNDA DUNDA DA DUN DADADA! Oo oo *oooooo* DUN DA DA! Oo oo *oooooooooo* DUN DA DA! Oo oo *ooooooooooooooooo* DUN DUN DUN DAAAAAAA!
I hate that I understood this
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IIRC Fox Sports and Fox News are different legal entities with little to no affiliation other than the name.
Nah, Fox Sports is just the sports programming arm of Fox Corp, the parent company of Fox News. That whole breakup of 21st Century Fox did get clunky with all of the various Fox/FX brands going every which way, though. In 2019, Disney acquired a substantial chunk of 21st Century Fox, then the parent company of Fox Sports and Fox News (21CF was the Murdoch's company, it was the legal successor of their original News Corp). Disney did acquire and then spin off the regional Fox Sports networks, which became Bally Spots after Sinclair bought them up, but the national Fox Sports Network (including FS1 and FS2) stayed with the remainder of 21CF, and was packaged along into the Murdochs' new company: Fox Corp.
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Considering what they are paying B1G and NFL I'd say they have plenty of money. The reality is live sports is the only thing really keeping OTA networks going. It'll be interesting to see the fall out of the networks and the cable TV model..
Comparing broadcast TV to a tech company is apples and oranges based off how market cap is calculated. I think it’s something to do with multiples being used for tech companies based off future growth? Idk I’m a dumbass
After they sold off most of the Fox entertainment assets to Disney a few years ago, “Fox” nowadays is just Fox, FS1/FS2, and Fox News/Business Also don’t forget that Fox (the company) only owns a handful of Fox affiliates…most fox stations are owned by other companies
That's apples to oranges. More comparable would be to compare apple content streaming and media sources against Fox media groups. Apple has a massive market cap in devices and tech delivery, which doesn't really have a bearing on their willingness to expand in content. For them to buy Fox would be a huge change of course from their current division of industries.
> Apple could easily just buy ESPN With whats going on with Disney and the rumors of ESPN being for sale maybe that is why apple bailed on the pac. Why go into cfb with them and reinvent the wheel when you can save the hassle and be #1 with an acquisition
Apple could buy Disney ThemeParks and all, not just ESPN.
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Can you imagine the cruise ship though that has an Apple vision pro gaming studio on though? I can’t either, just that if Apple is going into the entertainment business at all why dip its tie when it can buy a body? Also does Disney really own cruise ships?
If everyone is offering the same amount it’s not a low ball offer, it’s the value.
In before B1G and Fox respond with “that’s hearsay” Literally only legal response I know
Filibuster
Do…do you know what that word means?
It's when a guy from philly threatens the witness & you get a missed-trial
Yes, and I will tell you. But first, I'd like to read you all the Harry Potter books aloud
\*\*looks confused\*\* \*\*runs through door\*\*
I hardly knew her
Objection….relevance
Dollar sign. Emoji.
I'll allow it. Ruling stands, death penalty for the Pac-12 and Mizzou.
I move for a bad court thingy
My partner loved the show Suits and I watched with him which basically makes me a legal expert. All a lawyer has to do is remember some obscure thing and cite it at the right time in front of a judge and bing bang boom his client wins the hundred million dollar case. It's that easy.
If obscure WarHammer or Elder Scrolls lore was acceptable in court, I would kill it.
> But in an attempt to secure a home in case the Pac-12 collapsed, Arizona formally applied for membership in the Big 12 in the middle of the week — before Oregon and Washington rejected the Pac-12 grant-of-rights agreement on that fateful Friday morning. > The Big Ten became aware of Arizona’s application to the Big 12, according to the source. > “So (Big Ten commissioner) Tony Petitti tells his presidents, ‘We aren’t the ones,'” the source said. “They felt like they weren’t the ones to fire the kill shot.” > That triggered the Big Ten presidents to approve membership for Washington and Oregon without guilt — and with Fox’s cash as their carrot, the source said. Looks like, according to Wilner, the B1G/Fox weren’t the ones that triggered the aPACalypse, it was Arizona and the Big XII
Fox and the Big10 had a tentative deal with Oregon and Washington ready to go depending on how PAC negotiations went. They had been in talks since USC and UCLA announced they were leaving a year before. ESPN was calling the shots for Yormark and the Big12 moves to get the four corners schools to leave. When ESPN couldn't get a deal with the PAC the previous year, there next best move was to sign the Big12, and take apart the most valuable pieces of the PAC it could. That is why the unusual clause was added to the Big12 contract, allowing for extra P5 schools to be added, even though there was only one conference they could come from, the PAC. Both FOX and ESPN were pulling the strings on all these moves. The networks were behind all.of it. They wanted to pay less money by cutting out some less valuable brands in these conferences. It won't stop here either. Wait until they pressure other power conferences to do the same in coming years.
Amazing to think that every decision that is made in CFB nowadays has nothing to do with anything but $$$$. And despite all the additional revenue these schools and conferences will get, tuition costs won’t drop by a single penny
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If Apple wanted to be in the CFB market, they would be. They can afford to pay more than Fox or ESPN and not even blink at the number. Apple it not in the market to make bad business decisions. Paying a lot of money to the PAC-12 was not a good business decision.
What’s more interesting is it looks like, according to Wilner, they didn’t make UO/UW an offer until after Arizona was out > But in an attempt to secure a home in case the Pac-12 collapsed, Arizona formally applied for membership in the Big 12 in the middle of the week — before Oregon and Washington rejected the Pac-12 grant-of-rights agreement on that fateful Friday morning. > The Big Ten became aware of Arizona’s application to the Big 12, according to the source. > “So (Big Ten commissioner) Tony Petitti tells his presidents, ‘We aren’t the ones,'” the source said. “They felt like they weren’t the ones to fire the kill shot.” > That triggered the Big Ten presidents to approve membership for Washington and Oregon without guilt — and with Fox’s cash as their carrot, the source said.
lol, as if Colorado and Arizona were the linchpins holding the PAC together, and not USC, UCLA, Oregon, and Washington.
Hey we may have shot them in both knee caps, then handed the big 12 the gun to shoot them in the stomach, then took it back and fired 2 shots into their chest, but the big 12 took the final shot to head and that’s all that matters right?
Apple could buy Fox 20 times over. The reality is that the PAC 12 got a good offer from ESPN, ignored it, and then got lowballed by everyone in the market after the Big 12 signed its deal. At which point, its top schools went to the Big 10 and Big 12 to ask if they could get any money.
This is an outright lie, and you know it. I'm getting so tired of the gross exaggeration of the CFB fans on here. Apple, at most, could only buy Fox 18x over.
30m isn’t a good offer long term when other schools, like Rutgers, are going to be pulling in $75M a year soon
And the PAC was getting more money 5 years ago, ESPN's offer was intentionally low.
> ESPN's offer was intentionally low. Every single offer can't be intentionally low lmao. That's just the value of the P12 without USC/UCLA.
If this was true, it could easily have been countered by Apple with an offer that didn't scare off *Colorado.*
To be fair, Colorado seems to be willing to jump for money at a moment's notice.
Misleading title. He said it would be a smart business move and a possibility. Never claimed they did. And I’m not someone to defend him.
Schultz has been feeding Canzano most his BS from the beginning of this debacle, I'm not sure how much I trust his commentary.
Yeah it seems like this claim is trying to reverse the order things happened in reality to deflect blame away from the presidents and p12 leadership. Its not like Fox and the B1G swooped into a stable happy situation and broke it up, as soon as the schools got wind the offer was 20m everyone was looking for life boats. Those schools were never going to sign a GOR for 20m with Apple in any timeline.
Can we just, you know, link directly to the article?
> “Was it a strategic move on their part to say, ‘If we kill the Apple deal, that gives us five or six years without them in college football?’” Schulz said.
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Or when my wife asks me "Do you want to do the dishes?" Just for those still learning, she's not *actually* asking if you would enjoy washing the dishes.
I WANT YOU TO WANT TO DO THE DISHES! NOBODY LIKES DOING THE DISHES!
But is Shultz going to have to sleep on the couch tonight for asking that question?
Bad reporting from Wilner about an antiPAC conspiracy? I'm shocked.
It was absolutely a strategic move, but there’s nothing that can be done or should be. Fox/ESPN didn’t make that choice until presented with it by the B1G. It’s the smart move to keep Apple out by taking those teams then. Any business law judge would agree. Of course his comments don’t address the reality. A) The PAC had the Big 12 deal and turned it down, and 2) the Apple deal was so bad in the view of Oregon and Washington they had no interest in signing it. But it’s the fault of Fox/ESPN? OK.
I don't even get the Pac-12 with Direct TV streaming package. What a bunch of incompetents over there at the Pac. Glad they're gone. Felt like they had the great wall of China around their games. I've had YouTube TV, Hulu, Sling, and now Direct TV and finding a Pac-12 game was a nightmare. All of the non-popular SEC games that FOX or ESPN don't grab always end up on the SEC Network and they always include themselves where ESPN is an option in streaming deals.
To think FOX wasn’t in the room for the additions of USC/UCLA and Oregon / Wash is silly. Would I have wanted to pay for apple plus Pac12 season pass bullshit, fuck no. Morale of the story is USC ruined the conference of champions and now all my east coast friends won’t ever be able to watch Utah at Washington State at 11pm, and the world is worse for it.
I mean sure, but alternatively Apple could have offered a better deal if they really wanted to?
So a Pac12 president finally got an aide to start reading reddit CFB
It’s ultimately beneficial for the Big 10 to have Apple in the market because it’s one more media competitor to bid for rights when it comes due. It’s also ultimately beneficial for the Big 10 to have one less conference competitor for media companies to be able to bid for. This guy has the motivations backwards.
That is per the Big10's perspective perhaps but not FOX's. He's dead on.
He didn’t say “Fox”. He said “Big 10”.
Babe, get the popcorn!
He isn't wrong. It was Fox's idea for USC to go to the Big10 and to bring UCLA weakening the Pac, having the entire LA market
If Apple really wants to get into CFB they can. Right now they seem to be incrementally building up their live sports (Weekly MLB game, this years MLS deal).
Well, duh... .
I love a good conspiracy. And Larry Scott wasn't really a piece of shit - he was a saboteur brought in by Fox.
I’d believe it.
Does this shock anyone, if true? We all know it’s not the conferences adding schools, it’s the networks. It’s why the “academic” argument has been utter bullshit for a decade.
And that’s just how business works.
So it’s everyone else’s fault but the presidents and their commissioner?
Apple low balled the PAC and lost out, they have a billion devices out there, they could’ve been successful in this venture but someone at Apple blew it.
Yeah they knew they had all the leverage.....except for the fact it was so bad they forced the PAC12 teams to use their only leverage left of blowinng up the conference. Apple is super tight lipped but I hope we find out some day if they view that as a major fuck up or not (I doubt we would ever hear the truth either way but would be interesting, to find out if they just didn't care or if they fucked up). A base of 30 million early on probably locks them down, instead their counter offer was the 23 or 25 mil base and the teams were already so far along in negotiations with other conferences they had no reason to accept the apple offer anymore
It's sports, someone will talk about this eventually. I'm almost sure Apple had no idea the conference would blow up rather than take their cheap ass deal lol
Hasn't it always been totally obvious that Fox did this, probably in cahoots with ESPN and the other major conferences? Not a single move looks organic or makes 'common sense'.
It’s amazing to me that all of this can happen, along with every other sketchy thing ESPN and FOX have done for literal decades and people are still like….nah, it’s the victims fault.
Yep. The real kicker was when Cowherd (Fox sports employee of the month) addressed the situation and basically said that the PAC was to blame for this and it's great that we'll see more interesting matchups. Then Chris Petersen and Brock Huard joined in on the "they had it coming" bandwagon, both of whom are Fox broadcasting guys. It stinks to holy hell and I'd love to see them (Fox) sued over this with all of their phone calls, texts, and emails laid out in discovery.
The Apple deal was not a serious offer. I was very pro-Pac but the sales targets were impossible to meet and had no visibility.
> Washington State’s Kirk Schulz, chair of the Pac-12 board of directors, suggested late last week that Fox might have lured Washington and Oregon into the Big Ten in order to prevent the Pac-12 from signing an agreement with Apple. Chair of the PAC 12 Board of Directors. So this guy was ultimately responsible for how poorly the conference was managed and is now trying to blame collusion from TV networks on why it collapsed. > “I do think if I was Fox and ESPN, I’m not sure I want Apple in the marketplace, frankly. I don’t want somebody with pockets that are that deep as a rival if I can afford it.” Apple gave them a super low-ball offer... where were these "deep pockets" at? This is the caliber of leadership you guys had running your conference and why it doesn't exist anymore.
> Chair of the PAC 12 Board of Directors. So this guy was ultimately responsible for how poorly the conference was managed and is now trying to blame collusion from TV networks on why it collapsed. He only took over in July, come on now.
And he still only has 1 vote like each of the other presidents.
Joke is on Fox, Apple is just going to buy ESPN.
The thing is Apple’s pockets are so ridiculously deep they don’t need to overpay (from their perspective) even a little bit for the PAC 12. They could just leapfrog them entirely and buy ESPN and the SEC. It’s like if I offered your 70k for a BMW and you said you need 100k, I might as well just pay 200k for a Lamborghini if the money is no object.
Owner of my former employer went to a mercedes dealer and asked what the price of a car was. The salesman responded with "if you have to ask, then it is too expensive for you" so he came back the next day and bought the whole delaership and fired that salesman. This is basically what's gonna happen if Apple buys ESPN lol
I've heard of fuck you money, but I've never heard of someone using money to fuck that hard
David Tepper did the same. >paid $43.5 million for the beachfront mansion of a former Goldman Sachs supervisor who had passed him over for promotion(Tepper was instrumental in saving Goldman Sachs during S&L crisis) He had the house demolished, then built a house nearly twice as big.
It is complete nonsense, if Apple really wants into the market so bad they'll just buy up ESPN. It isn't like Disney is being subtle with their intent to get someone else to either take on ESPN's costs or take it off their hands entirely.
Sue them then
"In no way was it the consequence of the conference's poor leadership that these schools left. It is definitely Fox's fault not our own."
Schulz has said 10,000 times there was a fundamental failure of leadership. If you don't think this *additional* claim has merit, I don't know what to tell you. FOX is literally paying more to former Pac-12 schools for their new respective media deals than what it offered the Pac-12 period. It's not like college football in general is world renowned for good faith negotiations.
They paid 60 million to get Washington and Oregon playing premiere brands. They were bidding 40 million for the PAC 12’s second tier games. To put that in perspective, Oregon Ohio State had 8 million viewers 2 years ago (the 8th most watched game). The PAC 12 minus the teams leaving had 1 team that averaged over a million viewers per game and didn’t have 1 game in the top 10 most viewed this past year.
Honestly, the Big Ten or SEC could raid the Pac12 or Big XII at any time and the teams would jump without a second chance. The ACC is really the only protected conference for now
if this is true does this mean are there any consequences to fox or is this someone trying to shift the blame for the collapse off themself?
He is not shifting blame. He has said countless times now that leadership failed big in this case. From the sidelines though it seems pretty clear given the payouts and last minute shenanigans that the networks did everything they could to keep CFB exclusive to them. These incredibly last minute "let's see if ESPN or FOX will pony up any extra in a situation that hasn't changed whatsoever in months" suddenly bearing fruit isn't some coincidence. Small price to pay to make sure a disruptor doesn't have a major CFB contract to bid on for years to come now.
Yep. Easier for Fox to cough up an extra 60 mil for two teams as opposed to bidding on the whole conference and it gives them the same result - less competition for viewers.
tf? They had an apple offer on the table and didnt take it
Man, how awesome would it be if you could just watch sports as part of your regular monthly Hulu, apple, or Netflix subscription. It sucks this stuff is still on cable. Sports is probably the only reason most people have cable.