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.

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NHL: "I'm Not Dead!... I Feel 'Appy..."

Friday afternoon, rumors began to spread, and Friday night, the story exploded: The Hockey News reported that not only were talks underway, the NHL season would be reinstated on Saturday afternoon in New York, with a $45 million cap. (Link thanks to Eric McErlain.) Backroom negotiations appear to have started almost immediately after the conclusion of the dueling press conferences by commissioner Gary Bettman and NHL Players’ Association president Bob Goodenow. Former players and current owners Mario Lemieux and Wayne Gretzky appear to be at the center of the new deal, but rumored participant rosters have included virtually all the power players and blocs except Goodenow — player reps, agents, general managers, owners and various league officers.

Rumors of an incipient player rebellion against Goodenow started Tuesday morning, once he accepted the concept of a salary cap in the NHL’s $40 million offer and countered at $52M. What has come out since then is that the players weren’t necessarily angry at Goodenow for accepting a cap, but for doing it so late in the negotiations that there (apparently) wasn’t time to conclude a deal. Mike Modano of the Dallas Stars couldn’t say Friday afternoon that the players were behind Goodenow, which tells the story in and of itself. Goodenow is dead meat, because he has failed to execute his position’s only real responsibility — to negotiate effectively with the League on behalf of his members.

Bettman should probably be shown the door as well, for leading his business to the brink of disaster, but he may survive if the players can Goodenow first. That’s because, as is now clear, one of management’s primary objectives in this negotiation was to break the union. Bettman will get credit for doing so if he gets a salary cap and Goodenow is axed, and he may well deserve that credit. Of course, that means his side was negotiating in bad faith all along — a deal was not the ultimate goal, except inasmuch as the conditions of a satisfactory deal required breaking the NHLPA to the owners’ will.

One other thing that’s become clear since Wednesday is that neither side expected the media backlash after the cancellation announcement, especially south of the 49th parallel. And why should they have? From day 1 up until Tuesday, US media ignored the NHL, except for short stories about the offers in November that neither side took seriously. Since the season was cancelled, they haven’t stopped talking about it. My inner ideologue says it’s nice to see media just reporting the facts and not making themselves part of the story (ESPN, this means you!), but as a hockey fan, I wish they’d used their weight a bit earlier in the game.

Keep your eyes on TSN.ca — Canada’s ESPN — for stories and Off Wing Opinion for commentary, as I’m heading for Blacksburg tomorrow night for Hokies-‘Canes, with fourth place in the ACC and the inside track toward an ACC Tournament first-round bye on the line.

Miracle

UPDATE 19-Feb-2005, 0105 EST: One of the pleasant surprises of 67-65’s aftermath was the way Duke handled the loss. From Coach K on down, through the players to the media (mainstream and Net) and the fans, their reaction was uniformly classy and respectful of this Hokie team. Jordan Kos, the beat writer for Duke’s student newspaper The Chronicle, compared Cassell to Cameron Indoor in fan support and atmosphere, which is high praise indeed.

The funny thing is, if they’d handled themselves similarly during and after their 100-65 win 3 Sundays ago, they probably wouldn’t have lost this one. Tech fans online were outraged over perceived bias in refereeing (perceptions backed up by fans of nearly every other ACC team, plus those of Syracuse, Pitt, UConn and Kentucky), but entirely within Duke’s control was the way the game ended. Krzyzewski could have called off the dogs at any point starting midway through the second half, with his team up by 25 and most of VT’s starters in deep foul trouble. Instead, he continued riding the refs, the Crazies chanted “PLEASE STOP FOULING” at a Hokie team that got called for breathing hard, and Duke’s starters stayed in until the final two minutes of the game. Close to the surface was Duke’s strong opposition, led by Krzyzewski, to the expansion that brought Tech into the conference; Hokies felt he was trying to rub his point in long after the refs had already driven it home.

With the notable exception of the quality folks at DBR, most of the treatment VT got from Duke before, during and after that match was disrespectful in the extreme. That made for motivation, both on the floor and in the Cassell stands. Duke planted the seeds of its own demise that Sunday night, and the Hokies nurtured them to fruitfulness on Thursday.

Split The Difference, You Fools

All it took was a press conference scheduling announcement to blow things wide open, apparently. The NHL and NHLPA have been offering, final-offering and counter-offering all day, following the NHLPA’s agreement to a salary cap not linked to leaguewide revenues.

The league proposed $40 million, the players caved and offered $52 (both proposals including luxury taxes at the top end and exemption clauses). The NHL issued a “final offer” at $42.5 this evening, demanding a response by 11 AM, and the NHLPA responded at $49 before closing things down for the night.

Before that, the biggest news of the day was Canes owner Peter Karmanos, one of the leading ownership hardliners, shooting off his mouth to the Raleigh paper yesterday before negotiations opened up. So let me say this to Karmanos and his ilk: SPLIT THE DIFFERENCE, IDIOTS. Midway on the first two offers today was $46 million. The second two split at $45.75M. The players have given you “cost certainty,” which you’ve wanted and I believe the majority of fans have supported, and you have given up linkage — which will actually work to your benefit at the end of the proposed new CBA, given inflation and the likelihood that revenues will rise over its term (they can’t get a whole lot worse). We don’t hate you quite as much as we hate Goodenow yet, but that’ll change if you don’t play fair now.

$46 million. GET IT DONE, and give us our hockey back.

Stereotypes on the Road

Thursday night at the new members’ class for the church I’ve been attending here in Northern Virginia, the volunteer leader made an observation on her holiday driving habits that I found rather insightful. Visiting family in Wisconsin, she said it took her three days to adjust to the rhythm of Midwestern country roads: not honking when it took the driver in front of her more than a second to react to a red light, expecting farmers to be out on a slow-speed cruise around the county, etc. That echoed my feeling of displacement driving from the Indianapolis Airport to Columbus, IN last Friday night, as I realized my recently-developed NoVA driving style stuck out like a sore thumb on I-465.

So Friday morning on my commute (40 minutes, only one major tie-up at the Dulles Connector/66 east merge), I thought about how I’d characterize the driving environment in several of the places I’ve visited recently, and decided it might be interesting to poll my readers as well, whether on these places or others they know.

So, to start off:

• Northern Virginia — the best way I’ve found to describe it is moderate aggression combined with a hair-trigger temper. Bad combination. In an ordinary situation, you can expect the average 703-lander to be rather impatient about stoplights, quick to change lanes without much advance signaling, and not too worried about proper following distance. All of that is somewhat anti-social, but tolerable. But the temper problem means that whenever traffic is bad (on the major highways, that’s from 6 AM-9 PM weekdays), people jump straight from zero to psycho in no time flat.
• Massachussetts — the term “Masshole” was invented specifically for drivers here. ‘Nuff said.
• South Florida — some of Dave Barry’s best columns, in my view, were about his hometown of Miami and what he described as the “craziness” of South Floridians. That description fits their drivers like a glove. You run the gamut there, from retirees who view 30 mph as an absolute upper limit, no matter the road, to Benzes, Lexuses and import motorcycles that draw no reaction as they fly down I-95 at speeds in the low triple digits. Anything can happen and usually does, so just be aware.
• Atlanta, on the other hand, is more predictable: where South Florida drivers are crazy, Atlanta drivers are just stupid. If you’re wondering what a driver is going to do, just figure the dumbest possible thing and get ready. They run the I-285 Perimeter like it’s the Atlanta Motor Speedway; they make right turns from left lanes across 3 through lanes of traffic and think nothing of it; blind curve passing/lane changing foolishness is just par for the course. And don’t even get me started on the 75-85 northbound split, where traffic engineers contributed to the problem. Looking at a map, you’ll see that 75 goes northwest and 85 goes northeast from the split point; the obvious solution would be for lanes for 75 North to split left and lanes for 85 North to split right, correct? WRONG — if you work for GaDOT, that is. Far better to reverse them and have the exiting lanes immediately cross over one another.
• Pennsylvania — these folks are actually remarkably calm, given the roads they have to drive on.

What do you think?