I'm jumping back into realignment news this morning as I see a fresh wave of PR from the west coast reporters. It's been said a thousand times, but I'm still astonished to see all these reporters rush to the defense of a league its own fans barely care about when they went out of their way to bury us on three separate occasions.
I could certainly be wrong, but I see some flaws on both sides of the Big 12/Pac 10 argument.
The pro-Pac side is pulling all kinds of numbers to bolster its case, but they are imperfect analyses because it's almost impossible to compare ratings in a fair way across different networks, teams, time zones, and time slots. You can't just hold up a highly-rated Pac-after-dark game and declare it more valuable than anything the Big 12 can offer, because the Big 12 hasn't had that real estate.
Meanwhile, I see people on the Big 12 side of the argument who seem almost insanely overconfident about our chances to come out on top, as if it's a foregone conclusion. While that certainly seems possible, I think this ignores that the networks can simply engineer whatever outcome they want out of this. If they want the Pac to exist, and/or Big 12 to cease to exist - not a far-fetched idea, as we saw just a year ago - then that's likely to happen.
TLDR, as is always the case in realignment talk, is [shrug emoji].
I could certainly be wrong, but I see some flaws on both sides of the Big 12/Pac 10 argument.
The pro-Pac side is pulling all kinds of numbers to bolster its case, but they are imperfect analyses because it's almost impossible to compare ratings in a fair way across different networks, teams, time zones, and time slots. You can't just hold up a highly-rated Pac-after-dark game and declare it more valuable than anything the Big 12 can offer, because the Big 12 hasn't had that real estate.
Meanwhile, I see people on the Big 12 side of the argument who seem almost insanely overconfident about our chances to come out on top, as if it's a foregone conclusion. While that certainly seems possible, I think this ignores that the networks can simply engineer whatever outcome they want out of this. If they want the Pac to exist, and/or Big 12 to cease to exist - not a far-fetched idea, as we saw just a year ago - then that's likely to happen.
TLDR, as is always the case in realignment talk, is [shrug emoji].
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