Buzz Williams re: P65 breakaway coming soon | The Boneyard

Buzz Williams re: P65 breakaway coming soon

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They will break off in 2 years according to Buzz. I wonder if they told him that to get him to leave Marquette for that dead end.
 
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I always assumed this was a done deal and what happened this past summer was a way of easing into the transition. Now that the P5 have a little autonomy it won't be a complete surprise when they become fully independent. It's a game of musical chairs. If you don't have a chair when the music stops in a couple of years, you're screwed.
 
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What is he referring to that the ACC "came out with today?" He also mentions the ACC Network which we have heard mixed things about. I don't think he has any inside information.
 
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What is he referring to that the ACC "came out with today?" He also mentions the ACC Network which we have heard mixed things about. I don't think he has any inside information.
I don't either, but I don't think he is speaking entirely out of his either. Am I being foolish for hoping for Gov't involvement, declaring that if you're going to call it a "national championship" every state must have the option of having at least one school represented? Actually I know I'm being foolish, but were running out of potential life lines here.
 
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Not sure about the government getting involved. There was some talk about that this summer. Think about some of the historical programs that would be left out in college bball: UConn, Georgetown, Villanova, UNLV.

I remember reading this article from the summer which was interesting. I still believe that they want to leave basketball the same for the most part. I think the break is more for football, but who knows anymore.

http://www.cbssports.com/collegebas...r-conferences-in-college-hoops-leave-the-ncaa
 
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Ok
Not sure about the government getting involved. There was some talk about that this summer. Think about some of the historical programs that would be left out in college bball: UConn, Georgetown, Villanova, UNLV.

I remember reading this article from the summer which was interesting. I still believe that they want to leave basketball the same for the most part. I think the break is more for football, but who knows anymore.

http://www.cbssports.com/collegebasketball/eye-on-college-basketball/24662085/candid-coaches-will-power-conferences-in-college-hoops-leave-the-ncaa


when does greed stop. Cut off the knees of football competition. What's the next money maker.....Basketball.
 
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Why stop there. Why should a massive AD like Texas, Wisconsin, Ohio St., UCLA share money with a northwestern, wake forest, Oregon st, Utah?
 
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Why stop there. Why should a massive AD like Texas, Wisconsin, Ohio St., UCLA share money with a northwestern, wake forest, Oregon st, Utah?

This is where we are headed.
 
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If the P whatever break-off from the NCAA in the near future and cut everyone else out, will it stop there? I can see the next step where the same programs decide that being attached to the academic side overall infringes on there profits too much and break-off entirely from university side and develop into a pro-style development league. That would cause college sports to go back to what they were in the 1920's and 1940's. Completes the circle.
 

nelsonmuntz

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The thing I can't figure out why schools have not already filed lawsuits. This would seem to be one of the easiest anti-trust cases in history, because the principals on the collusion side are issuing press releases describing their illegal behavior.
 
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Not sure about the government getting involved. There was some talk about that this summer. Think about some of the historical programs that would be left out in college bball: UConn, Georgetown, Villanova, UNLV.

I remember reading this article from the summer which was interesting. I still believe that they want to leave basketball the same for the most part. I think the break is more for football, but who knows anymore.

http://www.cbssports.com/collegebas...r-conferences-in-college-hoops-leave-the-ncaa

Football is already broken away and not in control of the NCAA. The G5 really are just connected because of the basketball side of the NCAA. In other words, if it weren't for basketball, the football schools would have just ended its association with the G5 already.
 
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The thing I can't figure out why schools have not already filed lawsuits. This would seem to be one of the easiest anti-trust cases in history, because the principals on the collusion side are issuing press releases describing their illegal behavior.

When you read the seminal University of Oklahoma v. NCAA case from the 1980s that essentially started the entire power conference alignment that we see today, the NCAA Tournament is arguably a bigger walking potential antitrust violation under that ruling more than anything in college football. Remember that one organization redistributing wealth and imposing its own rules (such as the NCAA) is every bit as much subject to antitrust scrutiny as an oligopoly (like the 5 power conferences). The intent of American antitrust law is to preserve the free market (which inherently has winners and losers), NOT to protect the "little guy". Sometimes protecting the free market and the "little guy" overlap, but they aren't one and the same. You can see that in the Supreme Court's slap down of the NCAA's attempt to control TV revenue and equalize appearances - the Supreme Court effectively stated that there should be zero curbing of more popular schools and leagues to maximize their revenue. That's why there hasn't been any lawsuits despite all the threats from politically motivated state AGs over the years - you basically have a direct Supreme Court precedent that kills any potential claims.
 
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When you read the seminal University of Oklahoma v. NCAA case from the 1980s that essentially started the entire power conference alignment that we see today, the NCAA Tournament is arguably a bigger walking potential antitrust violation under that ruling more than anything in college football. Remember that one organization redistributing wealth and imposing its own rules (such as the NCAA) is every bit as much subject to antitrust scrutiny as an oligopoly (like the 5 power conferences). The intent of American antitrust law is to preserve the free market (which inherently has winners and losers), NOT to protect the "little guy". Sometimes protecting the free market and the "little guy" overlap, but they aren't one and the same. You can see that in the Supreme Court's slap down of the NCAA's attempt to control TV revenue and equalize appearances - the Supreme Court effectively stated that there should be zero curbing of more popular schools and leagues to maximize their revenue. That's why there hasn't been any lawsuits despite all the threats from politically motivated state AGs over the years - you basically have a direct Supreme Court precedent that kills any potential claims.

You have big guys in the G5 going against little guys in the P5. That will look funky to any court.
 
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The thing I can't figure out why schools have not already filed lawsuits. This would seem to be one of the easiest anti-trust cases in history, because the principals on the collusion side are issuing press releases describing their illegal behavior.

Maybe because as much as you insist that this is the easiest anti-trust case in history the lawyers who would be involved don't agree with you. If it was that easy we would certainly have seen filings by now.

There is no anti-trust case here. While it sucks for us the P5 conferences have done nothing illegal. They have accepted the money that the networks are willing to pay them. The NCAA membership (of which UConn is a member) has voted that it's OK for them to make their own rules. They have actually increased the payout to the G5 conferences through the football playoff. The only thing the P5 conferences have done is decide that they don't want schools like UConn, Cinci, USF & Boise to be members of their conferences which is their right. Even BYU would likely be in a P5 conference if they were willing to bend their rules regarding playing on Sundays & giving up their ESPN contract.

Yes, it sucks to be us & I'm one of the loudest posters here that the lack of revenues will eventually kill the UConn athletic department but, there is no anti-trust case here
 

nelsonmuntz

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When you read the seminal University of Oklahoma v. NCAA case from the 1980s that essentially started the entire power conference alignment that we see today, the NCAA Tournament is arguably a bigger walking potential antitrust violation under that ruling more than anything in college football. Remember that one organization redistributing wealth and imposing its own rules (such as the NCAA) is every bit as much subject to antitrust scrutiny as an oligopoly (like the 5 power conferences). The intent of American antitrust law is to preserve the free market (which inherently has winners and losers), NOT to protect the "little guy". Sometimes protecting the free market and the "little guy" overlap, but they aren't one and the same.

Let me open with, I do know what I am talking about here.

The NCAA Tournament does not have meaningful anti-trust issues because it is so open, and regulated by a consortium of all the competitors. It is not illegal to be a monopoly, it is illegal to act like a monopolist. The NCAA Tournament does not guarantee "the little guy" anything other than they get to compete on the same basis with Duke or Kentucky. If the little guys are not good enough, then they don't get access to the tournament, and they have agreed to those terms without coercion. The NCAA Basketball Tournament actually looks much like any exchange or market structure that is governed by a consortium.

The P5 is a completely different situation. The P5 schools have created a cartel that is exclusionary, and they created the cartel and then started imposing rules on other participants that also carried threats with them. Texas or USC or Oregon can make any threat they want, but when their power is derived from the cartel, they are now acting like a monopolist. The Cartel is restricting access to competition, has branded itself differently which carries significant implications with it, and used its cartel status to consolidate roughly 95% of the total revenues of the industry under the cartel umbrella while at the same time actually forcing competitors out of business. There is no corollary for this in the free market. The closest I can get to is members of the NYSE, and that is one of the most heavily regulated markets in the world, and there is lots of outside competition to the point that the NYSE probably only has 30-40% market share at this point.

Anti-trust cases are difficult to prove primarily because the government usually has a hard time proving the collusion. The Airlines just happened to all have the same prices on the same routes, or it is a coincidence that the oil companies all sell their gas in certain markets within pennies of each other or Pepsi and Coca Cola each just happened to require exclusive promotional shelf space from their grocery store retailers for 26 weeks a year. With ADM, they happened to have a crazy, disgruntled senior executive that wore a wire, otherwise they would have never proved that case. None of those problems exist here. There are press releases that discuss the Cartel, and principals from coaches to university presidents discuss the Cartel in interviews. The government doesn't need the FBI to storm dozens of locations simultaneously to prevent the destruction of evidence, it just needs someone doing a news search.

The one thing missing is a plaintiff for a civil case which would trigger the criminal case, and that does not currently exist.
 
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You have big guys in the G5 going against little guys in the P5. That will look funky to any court.

Maybe, but I'm assuming that you're including UConn as a "big guy" in the G5. Remember that a "big guy" in college sports is always framed in the football context (as opposed to the basketball context). We can take a favorite lower tier P5 punching bag like Wake Forest or Washington State and claim that they aren't "big guys", but they can respond that UConn has had FBS football for only 10 years, while they've been playing in their respective power conferences for the better part of a century. Plus, even if we define UConn as a "big guy" in the G5, how many other "big guys" are truly at that level? I'd say BYU and Cincinnati have the best cases. Beyond that, though, where is this critical mass of "big guys" in the G5?

Let's look at the practical reality of filing any type of lawsuit. Is UConn willing to sue the P5 by itself or with only a couple of other schools on basically a claim that comes down to, "It's not fair that we're stuck with these other bozos in the AAC"? Or are the schools that consider themselves to be "G5 big guys" more hopeful that they'll get elevated to a P5 conference in a few years if things break the correct way in realignment? I'm 99.9% sure that it's the latter. If you're a G5 big guy, then the P5/G5 alignment is extremely bothersome until the moment that you get promoted to the P5, where you then flip a switch. (Just look at TCU and Utah - they don't give two craps about who they left behind in the G5.) If you're a G5 little guy, you'd rather just hang onto the coattails of the CFP and NCAA Tournament revenue structures since they know that the only way that they can make any money at all is to stick with the P5.

So, the case law isn't favorable for a lawsuit based on the University of Oklahoma v. NCAA case. The G5 big guys don't want to make the P5 mad because they hope for a P5 invite themselves. The G5 little guys make more money taking scraps from the P5 than they would make on their own. It's pretty easy for me to see why there hasn't been any type of lawsuit despite all of these threats all of the years - neither the legal nor (more importantly) the economic arguments support that action.
 

nelsonmuntz

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Maybe because as much as you insist that this is the easiest anti-trust case in history the lawyers who would be involved don't agree with you. If it was that easy we would certainly have seen filings by now.

There is no anti-trust case here. While it sucks for us the P5 conferences have done nothing illegal. They have accepted the money that the networks are willing to pay them. The NCAA membership (of which UConn is a member) has voted that it's OK for them to make their own rules. They have actually increased the payout to the G5 conferences through the football playoff. The only thing the P5 conferences have done is decide that they don't want schools like UConn, Cinci, USF & Boise to be members of their conferences which is their right. Even BYU would likely be in a P5 conference if they were willing to bend their rules regarding playing on Sundays & giving up their ESPN contract.

Yes, it sucks to be us & I'm one of the loudest posters here that the lack of revenues will eventually kill the UConn athletic department but, there is no anti-trust case here

This is simply not true. You can do your own search on this, but even a casual perusal of the DOJ site and other online materials will highlight huge problems with the P5.
 

pj

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An antitrust lawsuit has to be a last resort, as it pits the G5 plaintiffs in an adversarial relationship to the P5. No G5 school with hopes of a P5 invite will sue the P5, and the other G5 schools have improved their position in realignment, so don't have standing to sue. Only when the breakaway is done and hopes of an invite have dissipated will a lawsuit come.

But the threat of a lawsuit is one reason I think UConn and Cincy and a few other schools will be in a P5 conference before this is over. It doesn't make sense to leave whole states and major markets out of your cartel; adding them is nearly revenue neutral, and a state school suing locally would have a friendly jury.
 
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Let me open with, I do know what I am talking about here.

The NCAA Tournament does not have meaningful anti-trust issues because it is so open, and regulated by a consortium of all the competitors. It is not illegal to be a monopoly, it is illegal to act like a monopolist. The NCAA Tournament does not guarantee "the little guy" anything other than they get to compete on the same basis with Duke or Kentucky. If the little guys are not good enough, then they don't get access to the tournament, and they have agreed to those terms without coercion. The NCAA Basketball Tournament actually looks much like any exchange or market structure that is governed by a consortium.

The P5 is a completely different situation. The P5 schools have created a cartel that is exclusionary, and they created the cartel and then started imposing rules on other participants that also carried threats with them. Texas or USC or Oregon can make any threat they want, but when their power is derived from the cartel, they are now acting like a monopolist. The Cartel is restricting access to competition, has branded itself differently which carries significant implications with it, and used its cartel status to consolidate roughly 95% of the total revenues of the industry under the cartel umbrella while at the same time actually forcing competitors out of business. There is no corollary for this in the free market. The closest I can get to is members of the NYSE, and that is one of the most heavily regulated markets in the world, and there is lots of outside competition to the point that the NYSE probably only has 30-40% market share at this point.

Anti-trust cases are difficult to prove primarily because the government usually has a hard time proving the collusion. The Airlines just happened to all have the same prices on the same routes, or it is a coincidence that the oil companies all sell their gas in certain markets within pennies of each other or Pepsi and Coca Cola each just happened to require exclusive promotional shelf space from their grocery store retailers for 26 weeks a year. With ADM, they happened to have a crazy, disgruntled senior executive that wore a wire, otherwise they would have never proved that case. None of those problems exist here. There are press releases that discuss the Cartel, and principals from coaches to university presidents discuss the Cartel in interviews. The government doesn't need the FBI to storm dozens of locations simultaneously to prevent the destruction of evidence, it just needs someone doing a news search.

The one thing missing is a plaintiff for a civil case which would trigger the criminal case, and that does not currently exist.

What you continue to miss is that all of these schools are members of the NCAA. The NCAA membership has voted, per the bylaws, to allow 5 conferences to make their own rules. The membership has also stated that ANY member school can choose to follow these rules as established by the 5 conferences.

Where is this cartel that you continue to refer to?
 
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This is simply not true. You can do your own search on this, but even a casual perusal of the DOJ site and other online materials will highlight huge problems with the P5.

What in my post is not true?
 

nelsonmuntz

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An antitrust lawsuit has to be a last resort, as it pits the G5 plaintiffs in an adversarial relationship to the P5. No G5 school with hopes of a P5 invite will sue the P5, and the other G5 schools have improved their position in realignment, so don't have standing to sue. Only when the breakaway is done and hopes of an invite have dissipated will a lawsuit come.

But the threat of a lawsuit is one reason I think UConn and Cincy and a few other schools will be in a P5 conference before this is over. It doesn't make sense to leave whole states and major markets out of your cartel; adding them is nearly revenue neutral, and a state school suing locally would have a friendly jury.

I think the P5 is concerned about legal action, which is why in some ways they are so generous with the playoff revenues to the G5, as they were with the BCS revenues too. Does anyone think the P5 is handing over tens of millions of dollars every year to the G5 out of the goodness of their heart when they have no intention of ever allowing a G5 school to ever play in the playoff?
 
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