Came across two really interesting football stories, none of which has to do with the Super Bowl.
First, coming off a banner year, the Mountain West Conference is making its case to the BCS that it should get an automatic bid to a BCS bowl game.
While the likelyhood of success on this front is relatively low, this will get the ball rolling to get this concession down the road if they continue to keep pace with other BCS conference. This last year the conference has teams finish 6th (Utah), 11th (TCU), and 16th (BYU) along with a handful of big wins against Alabama, Michigan, and Boise State. Why not strike while the iron is hot?
I see their point, but I think it would better if the Mountain West Conference and WAC which has Boise State, Fresno State, and Hawaii collectively split an automatic bad. Before your freak out, you should realize that basically the current system pretty much allows them to have one automatic bid but this would just really give them peace of mind.
In the end, not a lot of fans are happy with the system so why put duct tape on it for the umpteenth time?
On the NFL front, there is an absolutely fantastic article highliting the history of the NFL Network as they are rumored to begin negotiations to sell some equity in the network to Fox.
Why would the NFL want to sell equity in their network to another company? Simply put they have completely shit the bed in getting distribution for the network. The programming is good, the production quality is great, but the NFL has failed miserably in terms of getting the network out to the masses and thinks Fox can right the ship (similar to Fox and the BTN).
Cable operators have been going to war with media companies for a long time. Recently Viacom almost had to pull their channels (MTV, Nickelodeon, VH1, Comedy Central and others) off of Comcast because of carriage rights.
The article highlights how the network only has distribution deals with 2 of the biggest 11 cable companies and has walked away from many deals for further distribution. In particular they had a deal in principal with Time Warner but opted not to go through with it. However the real interesting part of this story pertains to a deal with Comcast.
In the proposed deal, Comcast would be allowed to get access to the lucrative NFL Sunday Ticket Package (only on DirectTV), would buy the rights at a lucrative price to the Saturday Night/Thursday Night football package for their upstart Versus network, in return for carrying the channel in its digital package.
They moved forward adding the channel, but were allegedly spurned on the other fronts leading to them pulling the channel.
All in all this is a great article, and if you too are a fan of the NFL Network or embroiled in its lack of distribution it really is a tremendous read.
