Today is “National Signing Day”; this is the day when high school football players let the world know where they will go to college to continue playing football. This is a concocted “holiday”; it is a paragon of excess. ESPN has been covering/hyping the bejeepers out of this for the last month or so and it will be a relief to see it in the past. Fans of various college teams lend incredible weight to the decisions of these various high school players somehow having convinced themselves that this young man is going to be a great college football player based on the fact that he was a great high school football player. The logic there has its strengths and its weaknesses.
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Surely the odds are better that a high school player will become a great college player if indeed he stood out at the lower level of high school football.
Nonetheless, many outstanding high school players do not become anything more than very ordinary college level players. That fact is demonstrated every three or four years when one looks back at the “career arcs” of loads of 4-Star/Blue Chip/Stone Cold Studs who signed on prior to their freshman year.
In essence, the tension and excitement generated by National Signing Day this year is the triumph of hope over experience.
Brad Dickson of the Omaha World-Herald had these two comments recently about the furor surrounding National Signing Day:
“National signing day is Wednesday. Groundhog Day is Tuesday. A study would reveal that Punxsutawney Phil’s predictions are 10 times more accurate than those of people who rate teenagers two to five stars.”
And …
“Signing day is when middle-aged college football fans warmly embrace the 18-year-olds they’ll be angrily tweeting at following losses in 2018.”
I am certainly not a psychologist but I wonder if the following hypothesis has ever been tested. These players who will be on national TV to reveal their signing decisions for college are players who have excelled at football for all of their lives and with that excellence came status and stature at school and in their community. Everyone recalls the BMOC at his/her high school. Now, some of these new signees will go to college and will not excel; in fact, some of them will fail; they will only make the team in order for the team to have enough bodies to provide practice regimens for the starters on the college squad.
I wonder if the social “demotion” from BMOC-status to Scrub-status hinders in any way the ability of the player to perform in other dimensions of the collegiate experience. If someone could show that to be the case, then those folks who raise up these prospects higher and higher on national pedestals might be considered to be folks who are setting up some of them for a pretty hard fall down the line. Just saying…
Thursday Night Football in the NFL is not something that the players like and for the last couple of years it has not been anything close to “must-see TV”. Particularly late in the season, many of the players’ bodies are not sufficiently recovered from last Sunday’s poundings to perform at top-shelf levels. So, what might you expect the NFL to do about that?
Right! They are going to expand the coverage of Thursday Night Football.
Next year, there will be more games on broadcast TV for everyone to see. In 2015, CBS carried the first 8 Thursday Night Football games; those 8 were simulcast on NFL Network; then NFL Network telecast the final 8 Thursday Night games. However, the contract for the TV rights to Thursday Night Football expired at the end of the 2015 season and here is what is going to happen in 2016 and 2017:
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CBS will televise 5 Thursday Night Football Games in the “first-half of the season”.
NBC will televise 5 Thursday Night Football Games starting the Thursday before Thanksgiving and carrying through until just before Christmas.
NFL Network will simulcast those 10 games from the 2 networks.
NFL Network will also televise a package of 8 games consisting of other Thursday Night games plus “late-season games on Saturday and additional games to be determined.”
If you want to read a lot of management-speak and bloviating related to the announcement of these TV packages, here is a link that will provide the opportunity.
Other reports say that CBS and NBC paid a total of $450M for their 2-year TV rights in this deal. That is an increase for the NFL because CBS had paid only $350M for the 2-year deal that just expired. Why are the networks willing to pony up an additional $100M for Thursday Night games that have not been nail-biters in recent times? The answer is simple; despite the marginal quality of many of the games, people watch. And because people watch, the networks are able to sell ad time at premium rates. As Deep Throat advised Woodward and Bernstein, “Follow the money.”
Finally, last week’s Pro Bowl drew a TV rating of 5.0. That was the highest rated televised sporting event last weekend and that is good news for the NFL. At the same time, that is the lowest rating for the Pro Bowl in years; this year’s rating is categorized as a “massive drop” since it was down a little over 25% from last year’s 6.7 rating and that is potentially good news for football fans who would love to see the game just dry up and blow away.
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………
If the pounding is the issue, why not schedule the Thursday night games with teams that had byes the previous week? Of course that also means that the NFL would have to give up several weeks’ worth of revenue so that would invoke one of the Mythical Pick wager advice comparisons.
rugger9:
I have had this proposal out there for a couple of years now. Cut the exhibition games from 4 down to 2. Add an 18th week to the season but keep the games for each team at 16. That gives each team 2 Bye Weeks and that would allow teams to have a Bye Week before a Thursday game AND have a Bye Week as we have come to know them.
“I wonder if the social “demotion” from BMOC-status to Scrub-status hinders in any way the ability of the player to perform in other dimensions of the collegiate experience.”
Are the majority of athletes in the “revenue sports” not already more or less doomed academically, regardless of how they perform on the field or court? Granted, most of them major in “staying eligible,” which is a pointless ruse I think we’d all just as soon see go away; I mean “academically” in the sense of being able to leave their institution of higher learning in some way equipped to meaningfully contribute to 21st century society.
Peter:
In no way do I think that the athletes who participate in NCAA “revenue sports” is the Nation’s emergency supply of IQ points. However, many of them could – if they applied themselves – learn enough from college courses to make something of their lives. And many of them could – if they were humble enough – learn to fit into normal society in some role other than alpha-dog/BMOC. My question here relates to a possible hindrance in achieving either of those ends due to the fact that they suffer a loss of status/prestige in a peer-group.
The comment about the level change is apt, and also applies to the academics as well. In my fraternity pledge class of 13 I was the only one who did not have at least a 4.0 in HS, and I have students even to this day that are aghast that they received a grade other than an “A” which they never had before. As it turned out I was also the only that graduated on time (B.S. Chemistry) but that also had to do with the NROTC scholarship, and about half the class did not graduate at all.
rugger9:
Indeed, there is an academic level change from high school to college as well as an athletic one. Your experience with students today who do not realize that there are grades below “A minus” rings true too.
By the way, my degree is in chemistry also. I suspect, however, that mine is a tad older than yours. I got my bachelor’s degree in 1965.