IPF

Split 11 ways or 12 ways?  Does UMass get included in the pot?

Endow $500,000 worth of football scholarships. 

I would hope the full time members would get to "split the pot", as I think they would have a more local/relevant perspective on how to most benefit their individual programs.  And if so, I would vote for using it on increased salaries for assistants and the likely inevitable raise that Groce will seek after an NCAA/NIT berth.  And more money for Evan Shaw and Russ Eisenstein.

Well, that seems a shortsighted use of the money to me. It's about half as much as we get for a one-and-done trip to Rutgers or Penn State.

I agree the compensation issue needs to be addressed, but $500,000 won't go very far divied up over multi-year deals for 20 or so people and won't keep anyone from leaving. You could double Groce's salary for a little while, but then the money will be gone and you won't be able to replace it, so you buy two years. And his salary still won't amount to even half of what a school like Illinois can pay.

Or you can buy more TV markets in an expansion that will give you that $500,000 over and over again.

Again, we could schedule another game at the Shoe and only play one half and come up with $500,000.

Another way to look at it, when ESPN re-negotiates our deal after Temple leaves, it may not take us long to lose this money that we're getting now unless we replace them with a similar market.

...and that, of course, is why they are being charged the fee. The fee is not a windfall...it represents a loss of value to the conference.

The current deal was signed in '09 (pre-UMass, clearly), and runs through 2016-2017.  Add Mass, lose Temple, honestly I can't imagine it being worthwhile to bother renegotiating.  Our whole deal is a very minor drop in ESPN's bucket in terms of rights fees.

http://sports.espn.go.com/ncaa/news/story?id=3866876

I'd love to see Steinbrecher heading down to the local Convenient Food Mart and asking for 6 million Mega Millions. (Odds by the way are 29.1 to 1 we'd hit the jackpot)

Yes, I'd settle for a better broadcast team. Really, you could probably accomplish the raises for Russ,  Evan, et all and better STO all in the same swoop.

I didn't know that about the MAC TV deal. Of course the MAC would sign a 7- or 8-year deal at a time when college sports TV rights are exploding. They're the types that get the ARM mortgage as interest rates are going up. Hey, go ahead and spend it on the IPF, I guess.

I still think you go East and South and try to add ODU, JMU, UMass (full) and maybe Appy. 

No offense to the good people at ODU, James Madison, etc, but if we have to pay them to join this dump of a conference, we truly are a pathetic lot.  Sorry, but I don't see any of these teams elevating the MAC's football footprint on the national scene.  To me, if they come in it will only solidify that the MAC is nothing more than a poor excuse for FCS/DI-AA football.  Any money we have to pay any of these jokes is a total waste of money.

Question for someone who knows about TV broadcasting/networks (so, probably anorris): What would it take (in dollars and infrastructure) to get all our not-otherwise-broadcast games on TV in, say, Athens, Cleveland, Cincy, and Columbus? It's been 15-20 years, but I'm thinking Marshall did something like that with WSAZ in Huntington back in the early-to-mid 90s when they were I-AA.

My guess is $500,000 is nowhere near enough to make that happen, but man, if we could get every game on TV locally and in Ohio's major cities, even if it's on the CW or something, that would be awesome.

The biggest problem you'd have is that most of the broadcast networks in those cities are already carrying college football most Saturdays, and we probably don't stand a chance of selling more ads in Cincy than, say, the SEC package.  Also keep in mind the MAC does have a 6-game over-the-air package that airs in all of the above markets, which wipes out some potential broadcasters for half the season (including the CW in Columbus).

Probably the most realistic thing we could do is something along the lines of the AggieVision broadcast we saw early in the year from NMSU, which is to use students to produce most of it, it'll likely be in SD, and even then we'll need some equipment, and put it on WOUB via our existing satellite truck, then just make our feed available at little-to-no cost for any broadcaster that wants to put it on the air.  Still not sure how many takers we would get, but that would probably be doable at 500k.

To do it well, you can spend literally about as much as you want.  To put a real HD control room or truck and cameras up in the stadium like a lot of major programs are doing with fiber running back to WOUB (which is linked in to fiber that could get the signal across the state), your start-up costs to do it on the low end would be well over a million.

An interesting, middle-of-the-road solution might well be trying out something like the TriCaster and a small complement of pro-sumer level HD cameras.  Not as high a quality of a broadcast as a full-on setup, but the NBA D-League has used it, for one example.  Probably could outfit a decent setup like that with basic replay capabilities in the 150-200k range, but I'm not sure how you'd get the signal up the hill without laying new fiber (which I have no idea what the cost would run).  Also keep in mind, even with student help, you probably need at least 1-2 staffers to work with students and maintain this kind of stuff.