I don’t know why Memphis isn’t in a power conference. I have a theory, and we’ll get to it later, but I don’t know why the Big Ten, SEC, ACC, and Big 12 have never accepted Memphis. I especially don’t know about the Big 12. Memphis has long made sense for the Big 12, in a lot of categories. How long? Well.
On June 11th, 2010, Nebraska left the Big 12, joining the Big Ten. It was a Friday. I was in a hotel room in Cincinnati watching SportsCenter when I heard the news.
My dad and I were in Cincinnati for a wood bat tournament. I think my brother was set to arrive later that afternoon. I didn’t play particularly well in that tournament, but I did get on base via hit by pitch. A local team, even at the 15U level, didn’t yet have their catcher putting down multiple signs when there was a runner on second base. Somehow, having been on second base two innings earlier thanks to a fielder’s choice, this was my fault.
Nebraska left the Big 12 that weekend, and ESPN radio was on it. Conference realignment speculation, then as now, carried the day. I remember well a commentator speculating that Memphis would be a good option for the Big 12. Memphis, they said, was hungry for the BCS world, and they speculated that FedEx founder Frederick Smith would put forward so much money (the example they used was through sponsoring the Big 12 Championship in football) that the Big 12 couldn’t say no.
For fourteen years we’ve been doing this song and dance.
This morning, news broke that FedEx is committing five million dollars a year for the next five years to support Memphis athletics through NIL. Reaction is dramatic. This, we are told, will change the game. This will bring Memphis to the forefront of college athletics. Five million dollars a year!
NIL estimates are dodgy, but we’re told Caleb Williams made ten million dollars in NIL deals during his time at USC. Hopefully when FedEx purchases the next great college quarterback, they get his throwing side.
We don’t have any problem with FedEx here, and we don’t have any problem with Memphis. This is a great thing for Memphis athletes, and FedEx seems to think it’s a worthwhile sponsorship. The thing is that this isn’t a new concept. Corporations have been sponsoring college athletics for years. The Dr. Pepper Tuition Toss happens at AT&T Stadium during a game which helps decide who returns to that stadium for the Goodyear Cotton Bowl. FedEx has changed the game by…sponsoring college athletics?
“But this is different! This is NIL!” Sure. It’s a different channel. But money is fungible, and while college athletic departments can’t pay athletes NIL money directly, meaning sponsors must choose between funding athletes or funding athletic departments…oh wait. Sorry. We’re receiving word that yesterday’s groundbreaking NIL news was the state of Virginia legalizing schools making NIL deals with their own players. Sure. It’s only Virginia. There’s no way the state governments of Tennessee and Virginia will act in corresponding fashion on a legal matter involving NIL.
This is a sponsorship. It’s marketing for FedEx through the chosen avenue of Memphis athletics. It’s the same thing as Alaska Airlines buying ten years of naming rights to Husky Stadium back in 2015. The cost of that, adjusted for inflation? 5.4 million dollars a year.
Again, congratulations to FedEx and to Memphis. We hope this helps. But this is not a story any bigger than stadium naming rights.
As for why Memphis isn’t in a power conference…
Memphis isn’t a great media market, but it’s not a terrible one. It’s big enough to support an NBA team. The resources aren’t bad, either. I think the issue for Memphis is that not enough powerful universities respect the University of Memphis. We’re told often that conference affiliation is a status thing. The schools with whom schools align themselves signal something back about those schools: Michigan wants to be in a conference with Washington, not Kansas State. Notre Dame wants Stanford in the ACC, not Memphis. At some point, the payout will likely become big enough for Memphis to be an attraction. But if, say, Gonzaga joins the Big 12, don’t hold your breath on the conference letting the Tigers in. Maybe it happens. Maybe things change. But we’ve been waiting fourteen years for the Big 12 to open its gates to Grind City. It hasn’t happened. There’s probably a reason for that.
Should the Stanley Cup Playoffs Be Smaller?
We asked a similar question about the NBA Playoffs earlier this week, and we didn’t really give an answer then. To give one now: It doesn’t matter. The best team wins, and it’s almost always someone with a regular season good enough to justify it. As for the NHL…
I really don’t know. The thing is a crapshoot, but unlike the NCAA Tournament, this hasn’t resulted in it becoming beloved across the United States. It’s a great event, but it doesn’t have the same pull. Hockey’s not a national sport right now. I don’t think the postseason format is a primary reason for that.
If you halved the Stanley Cup Playoffs, letting in each division winner and then two Wild Cards from each conference, this year you would lose the Oilers, Maple Leafs, Predators, Kings, Knights, Lightning, Islanders, and Capitals. The Oilers would be a loss, but they’d have earned it with their horrible start to the season. The defending champion Knights would maybe be a loss, but I don’t know that they’d be a sympathetic character with their LTIR gamesmanship. The Leafs? I don’t get the idea that hockey fans are dying to see the Leafs play in May for any reason other than schadenfreude. It’d be fine, but at the same time, so are these playoffs.
Overall, what we see with both the NHL and the NBA is that the postseason is so long that it’s a season unto itself. In hockey, the difference in play is less stark, but the difference in entertainment value is massive. I guess the answer, then, is to keep doing more of this? In an ideal world, the NHL would have a few juggernauts, but as with baseball, that’s not really how the game works right now. Even the Lightning’s little dynasty wasn’t as compelling as what the Yankees did in the 90’s.
The format’s not perfect. It’s a little big, and that probably hurts the regular season a little. But it’s far from an active problem for hockey. The nice thing about hockey is that effort’s never questioned.
The Rest
College basketball:
- The U.S. Department of Education’s latest Title IX regulations were released today (or are being released today), and we don’t want to get into them too deeply, but they’re said to “prevent colleges and coaches from suspending athletes accused of sexual misconduct while school officials investigate complaints against them.” I don’t know what the right answer is here. If the player’s guilty, everyone reasonable will wish he or she hadn’t been playing. It’ll have made a bad situation worse for the player’s teammates, the team’s fans, and most importantly the victim. If the player’s innocent, everyone reasonable will be glad he or she wasn’t suspended. The bottom line, as always, is that the best thing we can do about sexual misconduct is stop it from happening in the first place. It would save us a lot of headaches if we did a better job, as a species, of convincing one another that sexual misconduct is wrong.
The NBA:
- Depending how quickly we can get Gelo up and running, we might look at updated NBA Core Scores tomorrow, or we might push that into next week. We’ll be tuned in on all the NBA Playoff action, but the imminence of the Core Score thing is why we don’t have anything big up about the playoffs today.
The NHL:
- Not technically the NHL, but Jaromir Jagr scored a goal last night for a professional team in the Czech Republic. 52 years old. Kladno, the team in question, is playing for the right to stay in the Czech equivalent of a hockey Premier League. They took a 2–0 lead in the best of seven series.
- We do intend to bring Gelo, our NHL probability model, back for this postseason. Obviously, though, we’re about 24 hours away from needing to launch it, and it is not yet here. That’s our focus for the afternoon.
Chicago:
- Alex Caruso’s expecting to play tonight against the Heat, because he is Alex Caruso. We’ll see if it happens, and we’ll see how effective he is, but the Bulls should be roughly their full selves, or what’s been their full selves for most of this season. The nice thing about this team, as we and others have said far past the point of redundancy, is that they do hang with just about everybody.
- After yesterday’s rainout, the Cubs will play a doubleheader tomorrow. Four games against the Marlins in three days. I don’t know if the doubleheader hurts or helps the Cubs within the series, but I’d have rather seen Shōta Imanaga pitching today so that he could pitch again on Thursday in a five-man rotation with his full five days of rest. That said, the Cubs are already into a six-man rotation with Jameson Taillon back, and if they went down to five, they’d probably have pulled Ben Brown out, not Kyle Hendricks. So, it works. Would be great to win three out of four. Patrick Wisdom’s back from the IL, and Miles Mastrobuoni’s down to AAA. I didn’t realize he still had two option years.
- The Blackhawks forced overtime last night in Los Angeles to end the regular season on an encouraging enough note. First offseason order of business? To be honest, I don’t know. I think it’s Connor Bedard winning Rookie of the Year, but I don’t know when the NHL announces its awards.
