Conference realignment impact on your VB interest?

[tomclen]

Sure, it's all about football - but VT is all about VB.

So how will the ongoing conference realignment affect your interest in watching/enjoying/talking about volleyball?

No wrong answers!

[slxpress]

I want to hear from the people who feel like this will diminish their interest. 8 of the PAC 12 schools seemed to have found a decent landing spot. 3 of the ones remaining don’t have many fans on here (not to diminish their presence - I’m glad you’re here!). Stanford is in limbo now with no clear path forward, but it would take a lot to convince me they won’t figure something out.

To me the key thing long term is for Washington, Oregon, USC, and UCLA to find a way to successfully compete in the Big 10. If they do that I could see the interest growing, not waning. But those are the four big fan base representations on volleytalk affected by the recent realignment.

[kimdc]

I have always loved covering the Pac-12. If you take women's sports as a whole, there's no better league across the board. I am mourning the loss of that.

That said, Arizona moving leagues made me have to go learn about the Big 12 beyond Texas. I just never had the time because I cover so many sports. Outside the Pac-12, I just keep an eye on the top teams. I was really excited by what I learned. I am looking forward to getting to know these new programs. More excited for volleyball than ever.


I know Arizona sports fans are mostly excited about the change. A lot of that comes from the Big 12 being a better men's basketball league. But I had people asking me to break down the women's sports. They're excited about seeing how the Wildcat women do.

[knapplc]

I have mixed feelings. I think the additions to the Big Ten will make a good product better. But that comes at a price of losing what was a fun rival conference.

I'm happy for my team and conference. I'm empathetic towards the fans of teams who will be negatively impacted by all of this.

[n00b]

I could see west coast fans struggling to watch their favorite team play at 7pm ET/4pm PT.

[JJVb]

Will watch less just because won't be as convenient. Won't have free streaming/games on PAC TV as did before likely. Will adjust to still follow my favorite teams, but it won't be the same.

[comet]

I don't think this will make my interest wane immediately, however I'm unsure how having so many top teams in one conference will play out. The B1G schedule was already a grind on the players. Just not sure this will be a good thing in the long run. I'm waiting and seeing.

[vbcoltrane]

Overall, it doesn't diminish my interest majorly. I enjoy the sport - enjoy watching good teams, and really enjoy the NCAA tourney. It might diminish my interest in caring about the conference standings if these mega conferences have even more unbalanced schedules. But, even then, I have the substance of the good matchup to fall back on. I've said it multiple times before - the BIG with 18 teams now should just play a 17-game single round robin and call it a day. Sucks because no home and home, but so be it. OR, two 9-team divisions - two matches against division foes (16 matches) and 3 or 4 against the other division (the 3 or 4 changes year to year). Winners play in championship match. ONLY division record determines division championship - not cross-division matches/total conference record.

I favor 17-game straight RR.  With the increased travel, make less travel mandatory.  Let the schools do what they want with the extra three dates. If they want to travel far and wide, that's their choice.  If they want to play games at home or close to home, great.   If they want to just not play, fine. If they want to use one of the open dates, but not the other two, that's an option.

[robocop21]

I’m a big ten fan but I really feel like the big 12 won with the new additions. I love the layout of that conference more than the layout of the big ten. Apart of me feels bad for those students athletes traveling coast to coast on a Tuesday night. But we’ll wait and see how the scheduling all works out.

[blue-footedbooby]

As a longtime husky fan and having had family and friends who have attended
rival schools such as WSU, ASU, CO, Stanford, Oregon and etc, I'm sure to
miss the natural home and away rivalries.  Along with the time-zone
inconvenience, geography is everything to me, ie, I have zero connections to
schools east of the Rockies. The break-up of the PAC is very deflating to say
the least. Assuming other western based conferences start or continue to host
the regional likes of Gonzaga and WSU, my UW interest is definitely going to
wane during this final year of the PAC.

[kimdc]

Aug 18, 2023 16:05:31 GMT -5 JJVb said:

Will watch less just because won't be as convenient. Won't have free streaming/games on PAC TV as did before likely. Will adjust to still follow my favorite teams, but it won't be the same.

The loss of the free streams is a huge downside to this. I know the Pac-12 Network gets a lot of heat, but I always loved it and the accompanying free streams for things that didn't make it to TV. If you talk to women's basketball coaches, they directly credited it for the rise of Pac-12 women's basketball over the past decade or so.

With the Big 12, we will have to pay for ESPN+ and very few women's sports will ever be on linear TV. The Pac-12 Network put lots of women's sports on linear TV. And, yes, everyone actually did have access to them. There's not one thing that kept anyone from going with an OTT service like Sling or Fubo. If you had high-speed internet, you had access. You simply made a choice not to use a provider that would allow you to watch. That's a consumer choice not a lack of access.

That said, the fact that so many people either didn't know about the OTT options or just refused to cut the cord tells you that the Apple TV deal was dead in the water. We had a decade-long experiment with an option that was very similar to Apple TV. It wasn't popular. With Apple having just a 6% market share in streaming to begin with, trying to get subscriptions to reach the $32 million per school upper limit was going to be impossible.

If it was Amazon with its 21% market share, I think it would have been more palatable. I know I subscribe to a lot of things via Amazon. I log in to find something to watch, and they're advertising the various channels you can add. It's a push of a button and I'm subscribed. Often, I unsubscribe after the 7-day trial but not always. Sometimes I forget to do so. Sometimes I just find out that I like it too much. Sometimes I stay long enough to binge-watch a specific show and then unsubscribe. Sometimes I subscribe for a few months for a specific show, then unsubscribe, then resubscribe when the next season of the show is released. I think that's common behavior, and Amazon's popularity would have made people more likely to do that with the Pac-12 Network. Apple just doesn't have enough of the existing market to be as successful with that.

After USC scuttled the merger of the Pac-12 and Big 12 (then promptly bugged out on the league it had just hamstrung), it put the Pac-12 in a really bad position with ESPN. ESPN wanted that merger. The Pac-12 (well, USC, specifically) refused. This wasn't new. Reports at the time indicated that the Trojans had been the primary reason Texas was kept out of the league when Utah and Colorado were admitted. If Texas and Oklahoma had been added at that time, none of this happens. USC didn't like Texas getting to keep money from the Longhorn Network and got other schools on board with that, so it was a no-go.

After FOX convinced the Big 10 and the LA schools to do their thing last year, and the Big 12 was more aggressive than the Pac-12 in getting its deal with ESPN done, the big suitors were mostly off the table. They weren't giving the Pac-12 big money, especially ESPN. ESPN had already been thwarted on the merger issue and it was now in a cost-cutting cycle. It had the SEC already, anyway. FOX had the Big 10 that it wanted to answer ESPN getting OU and UT into the SEC. A lot of things conspired to doom the Pac-12 that I loved. Most of those things come back to USC being fickle and sabotaging the league several times and the poor leadership at the Pac-12/other schools that allowed it. ESPN and FOX each pulled strings behind the scenes as the other major players.

[bluepenquin]

Aug 18, 2023 16:07:22 GMT -5 comet said:

I don't think this will make my interest wane immediately, however I'm unsure how having so many top teams in one conference will play out. The B1G schedule was already a grind on the players. Just not sure this will be a good thing in the long run. I'm waiting and seeing.

I will particularly be interested in seeing what this does to many of the programs in the Big Ten.  No doubt it will be the elite conference in the sport - but how deep will it get?  Programs that were in the middle or maybe the upper middle/lower upper may take a hit.  

[tomclen]

The only question we all should be asking about 2024:

Will mikegarrison do a weekly "B1G" thread or will he do a weekly "PAC" thread.

Or both. Both, I could get behind.