Sweet......Football on FRIDAY!!!!!!!!!
Friday night fights
by Gene Wojciechowski
The e-mail arrived a few days ago.
Baylor head football coach Kevin Steele and athletic director Tom Stanton announced the school's strong opposition to the NCAA's recent ruling to allow colleges to play football games on Friday nights, the school-issued release began. Then there was a quote from Steele:
"It's unnecessary for colleges to play games on Friday nights. Friday nights are a staple of high school football across the country, and particularly here in Texas. It's important as institutions of higher learning that we support our high school students, administrators and coaches, not compete with them for attention on their night. Baylor has absolutely no interest in playing football on Friday night, and hopefully the rest of the Big XII Conference will take the same stance."
What a bold position. Baylor also opposes hunting kittens, stealing pacifiers from infants, and imprisoning grandmothers for wearing false teeth.
Yes, the NCAA made another knuckleheaded move by making Friday nights available for college football. Television, the beast that apparently must be fed at all costs, liked the idea, as did such attention-starved conferences as the Mountain West, Conference USA and the Mid-American. What the rightsholders want, the rightsholders usually get.
Nanoseconds after the NCAA legislation became official, the denouncements arrived. Baylor wasn't alone. Assorted high school associations took turns bashing the decision. So did prominent college coaches, athletic directors and conference commissioners. One commissioner told me, "We blew it."
But there's more to it than that. The NCAA doesn't comb its hair without first checking how many bristles are in the brush. This wasn't some arbitrary decision where Ced Dempsey and the fellas were at a kegger one Friday night and somebody said, "Hey, whaddya say we go ahead and approve that Friday night whatchamacallit rule. It'll be fun."
The truth is the NCAA is on a legal O-fer these days. It got Perry Mason-ed in court to the tune of $54.5 million on the restricted-earnings lawsuit, and, rather than face another legal challenge, it backed off on a proposal to eliminate preseason-exempt basketball tournaments. So you can sort of understand why the NCAA is nervous about trying to regulate Friday-night access to its members. In short, it didn't want another subpoena being delivered by the law firm of You're Going To Pay Through The Nose & Sons.
Restraint of business and trade is tricky stuff. Would the NCAA have been legally vulnerable had it said no to Friday night games? The NCAA's lawyers apparently thought so -- they were worried enough that they didn't bother putting up a fight. But the bigger question becomes, now what?
College football is already on Thursday night. And Saturday night. And now Friday night. Will high school football be ruined? Nope. Will, say, famed Permian High in Odessa, Texas, suddenly find itself with a half-empty stadium and a mojo deficiency just because TCU and Southern Miss are on the tube that evening? Are you joking?
High school football will survive because it means more than some silly Toledo-Bowling Green game. Sure, it would have been nice if the NCAA had stayed out of the Friday night lights, but seven TV games isn't going to kill anyone.
As for the Baylors of the world, I can understand the indignation. But Baylor, and programs like it, had to say what it said. Texas high school football is its recruiting lifeblood. Tick those people off and suddenly you're trying to sign kids from Delaware.
"Baylor has a great relationship with the high schools in the state of Texas," said Stanton in the release, "and we feel it's our duty as part of that relationship to not infringe upon Friday night high school football."
Sounds good. But what if ESPN or Fox offered Stanton a Friday night payoff that would cover the operating costs of a non-revenue sport at Baylor? Hmmm. What if he were an AD in the Mid-American, which can use all the national exposure it can get?
I don't like Friday night college football. It sounds weird. It blurs the lines. It compromises a tradition. But like it or not, it's here to stay.
Gene Wojciechowski is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. E-mail Geno at
Friday night fights
by Gene Wojciechowski
The e-mail arrived a few days ago.
Baylor head football coach Kevin Steele and athletic director Tom Stanton announced the school's strong opposition to the NCAA's recent ruling to allow colleges to play football games on Friday nights, the school-issued release began. Then there was a quote from Steele:
"It's unnecessary for colleges to play games on Friday nights. Friday nights are a staple of high school football across the country, and particularly here in Texas. It's important as institutions of higher learning that we support our high school students, administrators and coaches, not compete with them for attention on their night. Baylor has absolutely no interest in playing football on Friday night, and hopefully the rest of the Big XII Conference will take the same stance."
What a bold position. Baylor also opposes hunting kittens, stealing pacifiers from infants, and imprisoning grandmothers for wearing false teeth.
Yes, the NCAA made another knuckleheaded move by making Friday nights available for college football. Television, the beast that apparently must be fed at all costs, liked the idea, as did such attention-starved conferences as the Mountain West, Conference USA and the Mid-American. What the rightsholders want, the rightsholders usually get.
Nanoseconds after the NCAA legislation became official, the denouncements arrived. Baylor wasn't alone. Assorted high school associations took turns bashing the decision. So did prominent college coaches, athletic directors and conference commissioners. One commissioner told me, "We blew it."
But there's more to it than that. The NCAA doesn't comb its hair without first checking how many bristles are in the brush. This wasn't some arbitrary decision where Ced Dempsey and the fellas were at a kegger one Friday night and somebody said, "Hey, whaddya say we go ahead and approve that Friday night whatchamacallit rule. It'll be fun."
The truth is the NCAA is on a legal O-fer these days. It got Perry Mason-ed in court to the tune of $54.5 million on the restricted-earnings lawsuit, and, rather than face another legal challenge, it backed off on a proposal to eliminate preseason-exempt basketball tournaments. So you can sort of understand why the NCAA is nervous about trying to regulate Friday-night access to its members. In short, it didn't want another subpoena being delivered by the law firm of You're Going To Pay Through The Nose & Sons.
Restraint of business and trade is tricky stuff. Would the NCAA have been legally vulnerable had it said no to Friday night games? The NCAA's lawyers apparently thought so -- they were worried enough that they didn't bother putting up a fight. But the bigger question becomes, now what?
College football is already on Thursday night. And Saturday night. And now Friday night. Will high school football be ruined? Nope. Will, say, famed Permian High in Odessa, Texas, suddenly find itself with a half-empty stadium and a mojo deficiency just because TCU and Southern Miss are on the tube that evening? Are you joking?
High school football will survive because it means more than some silly Toledo-Bowling Green game. Sure, it would have been nice if the NCAA had stayed out of the Friday night lights, but seven TV games isn't going to kill anyone.
As for the Baylors of the world, I can understand the indignation. But Baylor, and programs like it, had to say what it said. Texas high school football is its recruiting lifeblood. Tick those people off and suddenly you're trying to sign kids from Delaware.
"Baylor has a great relationship with the high schools in the state of Texas," said Stanton in the release, "and we feel it's our duty as part of that relationship to not infringe upon Friday night high school football."
Sounds good. But what if ESPN or Fox offered Stanton a Friday night payoff that would cover the operating costs of a non-revenue sport at Baylor? Hmmm. What if he were an AD in the Mid-American, which can use all the national exposure it can get?
I don't like Friday night college football. It sounds weird. It blurs the lines. It compromises a tradition. But like it or not, it's here to stay.
Gene Wojciechowski is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. E-mail Geno at
