Interesting Series On The Future Of The Big 12

The Dallas paper has been running a series on the health and future of the Big 12 and today’s piece is on the future of media and how it will affect the league. Obviously it’s a question everyone is wrestling with.

They are focusing on how people watch games primarily. Check out the intro to the column:

“TCU's board of trustees got a brief glimpse into the brave media world awaiting college sports in the near future.

“At a recent meeting, athletic director Chris Del Conte used a student as a handy example that the times and the technology are a-changin'.

"‘He watched all his games on Xbox,’ Del Conte said. ‘It blew all the gray-hairs away. “You're doing what now? What's an Xbox?” It was just amazing.’"

The upshot of the article is that no one has any idea what’s going to happen and if Texas and Oklahoma leave the Big 12 is toast. Nothing new there but the worry isn’t gone yet.

Commissioner Bob Bowlsby concluded with this: "I think what you do is you tie your wagon to people that are cutting edge and then you go with them as they change things."

It’s a cautious strategy but sometimes that’s best. Consider the explorer Henry Hudson, who continuously searched for a Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

It was bold, sure, but on his final journey, at the end with ice pressing in, his crew had had enough and left Hudson and his son on a block of ice and sailed the hell back south.

These guys have thought through a lot but they should go back to that X-Box and think about E-Sports. How college sports are brought to fans is key but that X-Box and what it represents is huge too because younger (potential) fans are finding other avenues of entertainment that will cut into the audience for football and basketball.

Apple for instance is rumored to be working on glasses that would eliminate the need for a phone screen.

If you can pack the tech you need into a stylish frame and stream the world through the lenses, the opportunities are huge.

The competition increases dramatically as the attention span decreases.

When it comes to this kind of stuff, we remember the excellent ‘70s series Connections, which suggested that people see the world through the metaphors of the day.

In our era, it’s networks. If you look at say Duke basketball or Alabama football as a network (we’re thinking more packets than broadcast here), it changes your perspective a bit.