The Nittany Turkey

Primarily about Penn State football, this is a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

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Big Ten Big Deal

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At high noon today, Jim Delany unveiled the new Big Ten Logo and announced the names for the new conference divisions. The response thus far seems to be underwhelming. However, for Penn State fans, a pleasant surprise came in the form of the conference championship trophy, which will be named jointly after Amos Alonzo Stagg and Joe Paterno.

Big Ten Logo
New Big Ten Logo (Click for larger version)

The logo substitutes the numeral “1” for the “I” in BIG. The “G” is somewhat suggestive of a zero. So if you can’t read the words, there’s sort of a ten in there for you somewhere. This Turkey thinks it is pretty ugly. The Big Ten logo it replaces, designed in 1993 after Penn State joined the conference, appeared to be professionally concocted and pleasing to the eye, whereas this thing doesn’t do much of anything for me. I’m hoping against hope that the color will change from that visually annoying cyan.

“I need to switch careers and go in logo biz. Companies get lots of $ for crap. 12-year-old could do better than Big Ten’s new logo,” opines Cory Giger of the Altoona Mirror via Twitter.

And now, the divisions. I have to believe that both the logo and the divisions were hastily sketched out on a cocktail napkin before the the fun really started for the boys. The two divisions will be called the Leaders and Legends. Huh? Yeah, you read that correctly. I didn’t believe it, either. Why not Heroes and Villains? Or Peaches and Cream? Velveeta and Rotel? Or Cats and Dogs?

The Leaders division will include Illinois, Indiana, Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue and Wisconsin; the Legends will have Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Nebraska and Northwestern. The division monikers make no sense whatsoever, although Delany suggests that there is some historical connection with the conference. I have no idea which legends and leaders inspired this nonsense. They remind me of the group names  given to kids by summer camp leaders when segregating them by age. (The Legends, the Leaders, the Chieftains, the Pioneers, the Sprites, the Tadpoles… )

In addition to playing other division members, each school will play three crossover games against teams from the other division. Guaranteed cross-division matchups are Illinois-Northwestern, Indiana-Michigan State, Ohio State-Michigan, Penn State-Nebraska, Purdue-Iowa and Wisconsin-Minnesota.

With Michigan State being a Legend and Penn State being a Leader, the fate of the ugly Land Grant Trophy will be in the cold, silicon hands of the Big Ten scheduling computer.

“Like anything new, it’ll take time to get used to.” — Jim Delany, Big Ten Commissioner

Next season the winner of each division will meet in the league’s first championship game Dec. 3 at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis where they will compete for the Stagg-Paterno Trophy. That will determine the Big Ten champion and the conference’s participant in the Rose Bowl or Bowl Championship Series national championship game (SSMNC).

Assuming that Paterno will be coaching next year as he asserts, he could possibly compete for a trophy named half for him. That might be unprecedented. I’m sure that the conspiracy theorists will color this notion to suit their theories about Joe’s departure date.

With the exception of the trophy, this Turkey is pretty disappointed in today’s big announcement.

Turkey Made It

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One more Thanksgiving under our belts (literally) and this Turkey is still trotting, not having been carved up on the table. Hope you all had a happy and peaceful Thanksgiving!

Lots of good football this weekend! ?????? ?????? ??????

The Anachronistic NFL Blackout Rule

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The NFL’s TV blackout rule states that if stadium seats for a given game are not sold out, television coverage in the local area (defined as broadcast signals reaching within a 75 mile radius) shall be blacked out. This is a simplification of the rule, which has been around since 1972; there are many ifs, ands, and buts inserted by whichever high priced Park Avenue law firm the NFL retains for rule obfuscation. The idea is that if the game can be seen via TV, people won’t buy the remaining seats. I contend that in this economy, stadiums in some markets might never sell out, and the more blackouts there are, the worse it will get.

Consider the past Sunday. As you might or might not know, I’m a displaced Pittsburgher who has long been a Steelers fan. On Sunday the Steelers were playing the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in Tampa. I’m in the Orlando area, approximately 85 miles as the Raven flies from Raymond James Stadium. However, the way the rule reads, the Orlando TV channels cover part of that 75-mile radius circle around the stadium. The game did not sell out despite heavy ticket sales to Steelers fans (one Tampa Bay player said it looked to be about half and half) and a base of 40,000 season tickets, therefore it was blacked out for me. I wound up listening to the 1 PM game on the radio. Meanwhile, the hated Philadelphia Eagles were playing in Jacksonville at 4:30. At least, I thought, I would be able to cheer on the Jaguars as they throttled the Eagles. No such luck. Alltel Stadium is 113 miles from my house, but there’s that signal penetration thing going on, I suppose.

But there’s more. I have DirecTV, and one—if not the—reason I do is that the satellite TV company has an exclusive deal with the NFL to broadcast all the in- and out-of-market 1:00 and 4:30 games each Sunday. Aside from the non-sports entertainment portion of their charges, I pay an additional $350 per year for the NFL Sunday Ticket package. The NFL sucks off a portion of that annual fee as well as whatever extortion DirecTV pays them to maintain exclusivity of the NFL package. They’re being compensated quite well by us morons who demand to see every game. Only thing is, we’re not seeing every game, because the blackout rule is applied whether we’ve purchased the Sunday Ticket or not. I don’t think I need to tell you that we don’t get billing credit for blacked out games. So, even with this extra expenditure, I didn’t get to watch either game.

Naturally, the NFL would like to fill all its stadium seats. It not only wants the bucks from ticket sales, but also, it wants stadiums to look full for people watching from afar, thus enhancing the appeal of attending live games. The obvious purpose of the blackout rule was to make certain that people had no other way to see a “local” game if they didn’t buy a ticket.

Would I have bought a ticket for the Tampa Bay game at $120? Perhaps, but if I was going to take Jenny and two kids, it wasn’t going to happen, especially since the kids aren’t big sports fans. Would I have attended the Jacksonville game in person? Hell, no!

Perhaps the NFL doesn’t understand that in this recessionary economy, people tend to ditch the frivolous extras first. You take a team like Tampa Bay, whose record was 3-13 last year, and you feel damn lucky that there are 40,000 suckers with season tickets, because your ticket window sales are going to plummet. Start pissing people off in the local area (which apparently is more like a 150-mile radius) and you’ll depress future sales, too. Jacksonville is one of the smallest media markets in the NFL and they’re not doing well at all. They’ve even cordoned off whole sections at Alltel Stadium to reduce its capacity in view of the sellout rule (the NFL requires that if you do this for one game, you have to do it for all games, including the playoffs), but still they get blacked out. Better they should get some local TV revenue than trying in vain to sell tickets.

I know that for the NFL it sounds a lot like “damned if you do, damned if you don’t”, but shouldn’t a league that is raking in money hand over fist (including over $20 billion in TV revenue) be a little more sensitive to the economic plight of the typical football fan? Either reduce ticket prices or ease up on the blackouts, but how about taking a hit like the rest of us?