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………