A Completely Logical College Sports Business Blog and Random Thoughts on Chicago, the Illini and the World
This week’s classic music video is fitting considering that Terrell Owens’ publicist looks like she had an allergic reaction to the crack rock. In the meantime, to this day, I’m still perplexed as to how The Dogs don’t have the same notoriety with my generation as other flash in the pan rap luminaries such as Vanilla Ice, M.C. Hammer, and Sir-Mix-a-Lot. That needs to change starting today.
(This and a ton of other clips are on the Frank the Tank Channel on YouTube.)
Once upon a time, a major rock group could play air guitar, air drum, air bass, and air keyboard in a music video and be completely serious about it. That era ended about a week after the premiere of this video. In the meantime, considering the Steve Perry connection, I think this is the perfect theme song for the now-dead 2006 Chicago White Sox.
(This and a ton of other clips are on the Frank the Tank Channel on YouTube.)
Today is the start of a new feature called Frank the Tank’s Classic Music Video of the Week. As the title suggests, I’ll be regularly posting a nostalgic blast from the past to get your music jones on (with a heavy emphasis on old school hip-hop and ’80s monster arena rock).
For this week’s offering, it’s a song with lyrics that most people of my generation know better than the words to the Star Spangled Banner. However, I completely forgot how ridiculous (read: awesome) Sir Mix-a-Lot’s accompanying video was with the “booty stage” and subliminal messages. I couldn’t think of any song better suited to kick this new feature off.
(This and a ton of other clips are on the Frank the Tank Channel on YouTube.)
How can we explain what’s been happening with the White Sox this season? Even though we currently have the third-best record in baseball with the AL Wild Card lead and are coming off a spectacular extra-inning win against the Yankees, there’s an ominous feeling on the South Side of Chicago these days that the Sox are going to fall down hard. There are the obvious changes from last season, from the weaknesses of the starting rotation in general to our recurring Mark Buerhle problem, where our ace from up until a couple months ago appears to have now caught Steve Blass Disease. At the same time, the departure of clubhouse leaders Aaron Rowand and Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez might have put a dent into team chemistry.
However, there’s one mega-difference from 2005 that I haven’t heard anyone speak of yet: the absence of the great Steve Perry. There’s nothing unusual about celebrity fans, ranging from Jennifer Garner and her no talent assclown husband with the Red Sox to that kid from “Malcom in the Middle” with the Clippers. What made the Steve Perry situation unique, though, was that he was the equivalent of a trade deadline rent-a-player for the stretch run of the season. Here was a guy that had absolutely no connection to Chicago other than playing a few Journey shows at the Rosemont Horizon back in the ’80s (although bandmate Jonathan Cain is a Chicago native) that ended up being the ultimate bandwagon fan after the White Sox adopted “Don’t Stop Believing” as their theme song. Perry rode this resuscitation of his career to the point where he ended up celebrating with the team in the locker room after clinching their first World Series championship since 1917 along with being a prominent part of the subsequent ticket tape parade.
The average diehard Sox fan, including myself, found all of this particularly disjarring at the time. In fact, we prided ourselves on not being the bandwagon celebrity draw that the Cubs have always been, so it was incredulous to see an aging rock star with no previous association with the City of Chicago, much less the White Sox team, somehow become vaulted to the position of a top Sox fan within the span of a couple of months. Now, however, I recognize that Sox having Steve Perry in the late-summer and fall of 2005 was the equivalent of the Astros grabbing Randy Johnson at the trade deadline in 1998 – the last piece that pushed a team on the cusp of greatness over the top and into the postseason.
I’m not saying that we need the return of Steve Perry for the next few months (although “Any Way You Want It” is a great song while playing golf or for any wedding or bar mitzvah celebration), but there’s certainly a void in the theme song and rent-a-celeb category this season. I’ll take any nominees on this site to fill this crucial spot, with a preference toward lead singers of late-’70s or early-’80s arena rock bands (unless the nominee is the divine intervention named Flavor Flav, who would be an automatic winner). Any way you want it, that’s the way you need it…
(Image from Wikipedia)
As I noted yesterday, the Big Ten has entered into a deal with Fox and DirecTV to launch the Big Ten Channel in August 2007. After reviewing the details of this network coupled with the conference's new agreement with ABC/ESPN (which in and of itself also improved the conference's exposure), I believe the Big Ten has made a great deal both financially for its member institutions and in terms of exposure for its fans across the nation.The key element of this deal, from my perspective, is that DirecTV is going to be carrying the channel nationally on its Total Choice tier (the equivalent of basic cable) as opposed to the premium sports tier (which subscribers need to pay extra for a la HBO or Showtime). That means every DirecTV subscriber in the country will receive the network. Considering that NBA TV, ESPNU, and CSTV are all on the premium sports tier, this new deal is indicative of how powerful the Big Ten Conference is on its own.
How does this change things for the average Big Ten fan? The largest item is that there will no longer be the syndicated ESPN Plus package for football and basketball games on local television stations – all of those games will be moved to the new Big Ten Channel. There are some pluses and minuses to this. On the positive end, all of those previously locally televised games will become national telecasts with, at the very least, respect to DirecTV.
The potential problems stem from the prospect of the Big Ten Channel first, not having those games available to those that do not have cable and second, for those without DirecTV, not being able to get onto basic cable in, at minimum, its home team markets in the Midwest and Northeast. For instance, if the Big Ten Channel isn't able to get onto the basic tier of service on Comcast Cable in Chicago, Illinois fans and other Big Ten alums in the Windy City will be shut out from a significant portion of their teams' telecasts. I'm a DirecTV subscriber (and I absolutely recommend it 110% over Comcast – if at all possible, get the dish) so it won't affect me personally, but it will not be a positive change if the average Big Ten fan either has no access or has to pay extra for access to games that were previously provided for free over-the-air. Getting onto the basic cable systems in the Big Ten home media markets is essential (any carriage outside of that would be gravy).
The network is a significantly positive development for the fans living outside of their favorite team's home market since those that are DirecTV subscribers will get access to games that they previously had to pay extra for on ESPN Full Court. Thus, this won't only benefit the Illini fan living in Florida, but also the Ohio State fan living in the heart of Big Ten Country in Chicago or Indianapolis. This also means that I'll be able to watch every single Big Ten football and basketball game from the comforts of my leather sofa, which means that I'm probably not going to be moving away from my television much from September through March. (Note: my appetite for Big Ten sports is so insatiable that I end up watching most Northwestern games, who play something that vaguely resembles basketball, just to tide me over between Illini games and other big conference matchups).
With all of the hub-bub regarding the new network, it's easy to forget that the Big Ten also significantly improved their deal with ABC/ESPN, with every ABC regional football game being broadcast nationally on one of the ESPN networks in the markets where the ABC affiliate isn't showing the Big Ten game along with more basketball telecasts on ESPN with a new nationally televised Thursday night game that's in addition to Super Tuesday (hooray for more games not involving Duke or UNC). That means that the Big Ten has increased the number of nationally televised football and basketball games on both ABC and, most importantly, the worldwide leader of ESPN.
On top of all that, there's the monetary aspect of the deal. Sources from Iowa and Michigan State report that each school is expected to receive an additional $7.5 million in revenue in the first year for the Big Ten Channel alone. Keep in mind that this figure doesn't even include the Big Ten's separate contracts with ABC/ESPN and CBS for men's basketball games (the old television contracts are expected to give the Big Ten $6.4 million in 2006, which is a number that should go up with the new ABC/ESPN contract). That means the Big Ten is looking at upwards of $14 million per year in television revenue for each school. To put this in perspective, Notre Dame, which is the standard-bearer when it comes to money and college sports, made $6.43 million per year in its deal that ended in 2004 with NBC (figures for the current Notre Dame/NBC deal are unavailable, but the annual rights fees in the contract ending in 2004 were actually lower than the first deal signed between the two entities in the 1990s). (Update: Other reports pegged the amount of the Notre Dame/NBC deal at $9 million per year).
These numbers mean two things: (1) the Big Ten has put itself into position to be the most financially dominant conference in the country, if it wasn't already and (2) expansion of the conference will almost certainly not happen unless that new member is named Notre Dame. I suggested a few months ago that if the Irish continued to balk at the prospect of joining the Big Ten, the conference ought to look at Syracuse as a potential 12th member. With this new deal, however, it will take a new member to provide upwards of $14 million per year in additional revenue just for the current schools to make the same amount of money with 12 teams as they had with 11 teams. Even with additional money from the creation of a Big Ten football championship game, I doubt that anyone other than Notre Dame could possibly provide the additional revenue that would make expansion worth it for the conference.
There are certainly risks from taking content that networks would surely pay a lot of money for in-house, but the Big Ten is the one conference that overcome such negative prospects. The Big Ten's home base of markets that includes Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia is the largest and strongest out of any other conference while its alums are spread widely from the Michigan and Penn State grads on the East Coast to the Illinois and Wisconsin expats in the Sun Belt and West Coast. All in all, this looks to be a great deal for the Big Ten and reaffirms it as the preeminent conference in college sports.
Other thoughts from across the nation on the Big Ten Channel:
1) A Look at the Big Ten Channel (IlliniBoard)
2) Big Ten Network is Set Up with Fox (New York Times)
3) Big Ten Gambles on TV Channel (Chicago Tribune)
4) A Big Ten Channel Would Be A Big Boon (Sporting News)
5) Will Cable Outlets View Big Ten Channel as Must-Carry TV? (Capital Times)
6) Big Ten Creates its Own Network (SportsBiz)
And finally…
7) Big Ten Network Unfortunately to Include Northwestern, Purdue and Minnesota Games (Sports Pickle)
There have been two things annoying me over the past week. The first is the performance of my fantasy baseball team, where I'm about a couple days away from having my pitching staff massacred Steinbrenner-style. I'll spare you the details – I could seriously write three or four posts per day devoted to my fantasy baseball and football exploits, but my total readership would plummet from five to two.
The other item driving me bonkers is a bit more universal: reruns upon reruns upon reruns. Even more infuriating is ABC's practice of promoting "new episodes" of "Lost", "Desperate Housewives", and "Grey's Anatomy" that are just a bunch of clips of previous shows (I wouldn't need to "catch-up" on what the people on the "Lost" island have been doing if you'd show a new show more often than once a freakin' month). All of this is predicated upon the idiotic time-worn belief of television executives that the American public only wants to watch new TV episodes during November, February, and May.
The aforementioned months are "sweeps" months, which are when Nielsen conducts its most thorough measurements of who is watching television (note: July is also considered a sweeps month, but networks rarely air new episodes of its hit shows during that time). The TV networks then rely on this information to set new advertising rates for its programs. As a result, the networks hold back a disproportionate amount of their new and best shows for those three periods a year while the rest of the time is hit or miss (you also know it's sweeps month when your local news has a "special investigation" into how the latest popular toy/kitchen gadget/something in your home/something in your car/something in fast-food restaurants kills babies).
The one over-the-air network that has mercifully stepped out of this ridiculous cycle (several cable networks such as MTV and FX have already been doing this for years) is Fox. Viewers receive five straight months of shows such as "24" and "American Idol" without interruption. Not surprisingly, Fox, which once upon a time was the butt of countless UHF jokes, will almost certainly end up winning the coveted age 18-49 category in the ratings by the end of May (advertisers care about this number much more than overall total ratings because of the group's spending power).
Like many things in life, Fox's move wasn't born out of brilliance but rather necessity. Fox airs Major League Baseball's postseason every year in October, which means it needs to shelve new episodes of shows that would normally be aired during that time. This caused a huge number of problems in the first years that Fox had baseball since the game conflicts came only a couple of weeks after the networks started their traditional fall television season. In order to adapt, Fox went to the equivalent of a multiple season format, where the network airs a block of programs from the beginning of summer through the end of September, have a different schedule for October through December, and then a third slate of programs from January through May.
What initially was a disruption from baseball that was difficult to recover from for the rest of the year turned into the catalyst for Fox's ratings success. The network stumbled upon something that should have been obvious but no one else had bothered to consider: people enjoy watching new episodes of their favorite shows every week without stopping as opposed to having a season stretch out for nine months. This is especially true of dramas that have rolling storylines and plots. One of my favorite shows is "Lost", yet it is maddening when I have to wait a month to get a resolution to a cliffhanger. "24", on the other hand, rolls on straight through from January through May without impediment, which, for me, heightens the anticipation and intensity for each subsequent episode.
Judging by the way the ratings have gone the past couple of years, the public seems to agree with me. It would behoove the other networks to follow Fox's lead and break out of a television season cycle that should have been abandoned a long time ago. People are a lot smarter than considering a bunch of clips to be a "new" episode.
Additional Article of Note:
A New Yorker article on sweeps from 2003 goes into how the sunken costs of the current Nielsen system and the interests of affiliates are severe roadblocks to getting the sweeps cycle changed.
Some random thoughts for your Final Four weekend:
1) Bucky Survives and Advances – Forget about Presidential elections. What terrifies me about the voting patterns of the Red States is that Bucky Covington could very well be our next American Idol. If you've watched this season at all and have any discernible taste in music (or just an appreciation of proper intonation), you know exactly what I'm talking about. Not only did he not finish in the bottom 3 this week, but next week everyone has to sing country songs (looks like I'll be just tuning in for the results show), which plays right into Bucky's Southern Strategy. We can't let this happen. Vote or die, people!
2) The Pink Line – I seriously thought the Chicago Tribune was pulling an early April Fool's joke on us with this morning's front page article. Unfortunately, every time I set the bar lower for the CTA, they manage to limbo right under there.
3) Kelvin Sampson Hired at IU – The only thing more surprising than the announcement of Sampson's hiring at Indiana is the tepid response of Hoosier fans. As I said before, IU fans were expecting Coach K to drop everything, move to Bloomington, and bring along Phil Jackson and Pat Riley as his assistants. Notwithstanding the ignorance of its fan base, I believe that Indiana made a great hire and he was certainly as close to the top of the coaching mountain as the school could reasonably attain.
Take this from an Illini guy who was hoping that IU would screw up and bow to nepotistic pressure to hire within the “Indiana Family” a la Steve Alford (or the gold standard of Isiah Thomas): anyone that argues that Indiana should have hired Alford over Sampson is insane. Sampson has proven he can win lots of games and recruit great talent at the basketball backwaters of Pullman and Norman. It's interesting to note that the Hoosier fans that are most critical of the baggage regarding Sampson's calls to recruits are pretty much the same people that vehemently defended a coach that choked his players. Seems just a little bit hypocritical for them to pull out the "integrity" card, no?
All in all, Kelvin Sampson is a great fit for Indiana and is going to provide some tough competition on the floor and on the recruiting trails in the Big Ten. Indiana fans ought to thank their lucky stars they got this good of a coach.
4) Final Four Predictions – I'm not betting against George Mason anymore – I'm a believer. So, I'm going with George Mason over Florida and UCLA over LSU in the semifinals.
Have a great weekend!
A few quick thoughts on my first-ever Rolling Stones concert at the United Center last night:
1) Mick Jagger has an insane amount of energy for any rock star at any age, much less someone who’s 62 years old. I’ve seen a good number of bands and I’d be hardpressed to think of anyone who ran around stage and put as much into a performance as Mick. This is all from a guy who once said he’d rather be dead than still be playing “Satisfaction” at age 45.
2) The Chicago indoor smoking ban does not apply to Keith Richards.
3) While most of the show was accompanied by a dazzling light and video display on a huge stage, my favorite part was when a portion of the stage actually moved out to the center of the arena for several songs. All of the background displays were then turned off at that time so it was just purely the band playing on a tiny stage surrounded by fans on all sides. It was a great effect since it almost felt like I was watching them in a small club for those songs rather than a large sports stadium.
4) Whatever you may think of the Stones’ songs, they are certainly spectacular entertainers. Even my wife, who isn’t a big Rolling Stones fan, thought the show was awesome. All in all, it was an incredible experience.
Meanwhile, there’s a lot of sports to talk about – I’ll be back soon.
With apologies to my readers that are fans of its shows, but I’m perversely gleeful about the problems and shake-ups at the WB Network. My beef with the network is pretty simple and hard-headed: when the WB was launched in 1995, its Chicago affiliate WGN had to cut the number of the station’s Cubs and White Sox baseball telecasts in half in order to make room for inane shows by the Wayans brothers.
For most of Western Civilization and the developed world, this wasn’t a problem because they could simply switch the approriate cable television channel to watch those games. However, at the time of the WB launch, I lived in a mud hut with parents who to this day have never paid a dime in their lives for cable. If you don’t know me already, you’ll find out soon enough that I am a baseball freak, so after being accustomed to watching baseball on a daily basis for seriously as long as I could remember watching TV, finding an episode of “Sister, Sister” on WGN rather than a meaningless mid-September Sox-Royals game spurred me to initiate a personal boycott. Even though I now have a DirecTV account that gives me access to hundreds of more baseball games than I could ever possibly watch, I still can’t evaluate any show on the WB objectively because of this deep-seeded bias against anything that appears on the network.
Of course, since the WB has banked its entire existence on attracting an audience of teenage girls (not my biased words – that’s the linked New York Times article’s analysis), it hasn’t been hard for me to avoid its shows. I’m glad the WB’s executives paid $100,000 for their Ivy League MBAs and blew literally hundreds of millions of dollars in television production costs before figuring out that (surprise!) teenage girls are a pretty fickle audience, meaning that they had a shaky foundation for an over-the-air TV network. I could have told them that when I was a high school kid who just wanted to watch some baseball in 1995.
“Pro wrestler-turned-yoga guru” Diamond Dallas Page is suing Jay-Z for trademark and copyright infringement over the use of the “Diamond Cutter” hand symbol. This is the type of story, sent to me last week by my buddy Matt, that made me want to become a lawyer.
After discussing this case with my boss (a real productive use of time), this is probably not going to end well for the world’s foremost pro wrestler/yoga guru, but it’s not as crazy of a case as it looks at face value.
Regarding the copyright infringement allegation, artistic expressions are one of the main areas that the Copyright Act intends to protect. I know what you’re thinking… how can a hand gesture be an artistic expression? Well, think of it this way – at Juilliard, the world’s preeminent fine arts school, students can study music, drama, and, most importantly for the purposes of this case, dance. It is well established that a choreographed work, which at its core is body movement, is artistic expression and copyrightable as long as it is in a tangible medium (i.e. a live performance is recorded on tape). As a result, it’s not too far of a stretch that a hand gesture might fall under this category.
However, it may be difficult to show that a short hand gesture meets the copyright requirement of being the “fruits of intellectual labor” because of its brevity. For instance, short phrases or dance moves are not copyrightable. A hand gesture might be too short in its execution for anyone to be able to claim a copyright.
The problem for Diamond Dallas Page is that the copyright infringement allegation is probably the stronger of the two claims. The brevity of the hand gesture doesn’t matter in a trademark infringement claim, but proving confusion is an essential element.
From the article, it looks like Diamond Dallas is basing his trademark infringement argument on that the public is being confused as to the source of the Diamond Cutter – Diamond Dallas’ attorney claims that people are starting believe that the pro wrestler/yoga guru borrowed it from Jay-Z instead of the other way around. However, this really isn’t the intent of the confusion test. Instead, a court would probably focus on whether Jay-Z is trying to confuse the public by using the Diamond Cutter in order to pass himself off as Diamond Dallas or benefit from the association economically with Diamond Dallas. Based on the minimal facts that are in the article, both of those scenarios would be extremely hard for the pro wrestler/yoga guru to prove.
P.S. If this goes to trial, could you imagine the showdown between Diamond Dallas’ entourage and Jay-Z’s posse in the courtroom? Court TV needs to show every moment of this trial.
P.P.S. On another Jay-Z note from Matt, I’ll be looking for my 2003 Mitchell & Ness Jay-Z retirement jersey under the tree next week. This will go right next to my 1998 Michael Jordan and 2003 Roger Clemens jerseys.
FRANK THE TANK'S SLANT 