Media Market Mythology: A Look Back
While surfing in the wake of Virginia Tech’s men’s basketball wins over Miami and Duke last week, I came across a late January article by Dave of Dave Sez, noting that Boston College’s 29 January game against Villanova was only BC’s second men’s basketball sellout of the year — despite being undefeated at the time — and only its second televised game as well.
Their second sellout of the season in an arena that holds just 8,606? In a city the size of Boston (over 5 million people)? That’s disgraceful.
The ACC suits fell in love with the idea of getting the Boston TV market, but they failed to recognize that no one there cares about BC.
Exactly right. This is why Virginia Tech fans used to go absolutely bonkers hearing about ACC expansion plans, based on media markets, that didn’t include the Hokies — whether they involved BC, Syracuse, or anybody else in the Northeast corridor. We’d been to those cities, played those teams, and knew full well how much people in the Northeast, outside of Connecticut and western Pennsylvania1, cared about college sports anyway: not bloody much.
The Big East was built on televsion markets: New York, Boston, Philadelphia. The SEC is located in such media strongholds as Gainesville-Ocala, Knoxville, and Birmingham-Tuscaloosa. Yet somehow the SEC is the most profitable conference in the NCAA, while the Big East couldn’t defend itself against the raiding of its two top football schools and a founding member of the conference over the summer of 2003.
ACC fans should be able to recognize why, because SEC football triumphed for the exact same reason that ACC basketball has been wildly successful for 50 years: both conferences have strong programs, with terrifically devoted fan bases, building a sterling brand reputation that transcended their regional base. Why else can I walk into any sports shop anywhere in the United States and find decent selections of Florida and Alabama gear? Why else would a local grudge match between a Methodist college and the state flagship university 10 miles down US 15/501 be the #1 rivalry in college basketball year after year? If you’re putting a good product on the television, people will watch it no matter who you are — as proved in football by a former military school in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia in the late 1990s. (The reason the ACC had to change, while the SEC did not, can be summed up in two words: football rules.)
Television simply requires a good product, something the new ACC is better geared to provide with the Hokies in the fold — which is what we argued for years. We Hokies are just thankful someone finally listened.
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In my opinion, western Pennsylvania has more in common with the Midwest than the I-95 Bos-Wash megalopolis anyway. ↩