I believe the MW is finished adding full programs. I suspect we might add a basketball or football only program for a partial share though.
Official : NIU to the Mountain West
- Thread starter WYNN or Dye
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It is part of the Texas A&M school system and easily would be able to fund moving up to a higher level. The positive is that Texas is football crazy and they already have a very good sized crowd for a lower division program. The main negative is the school is located in a relatively small town which may cause issues in regards to attendance growth. The question would be could they build a stadium or expand on the existing stadium to seat at least 30K? Would enough people be willing to travel for a couple of hours to attend games so that the attendance could jump up to at least 25K? In regards to the stadium, it is built in a way that they could easily expand from the 24K that it currently seats to over 30K with a minimal cost, and could likely expand to around 40K by leaving the main stand area as is and expanding in the open areas without a total rebuild. In regards to people willing to go to the games from further out, this is Texas where people travel 6-8 hours for high school football games. Finally they have around 18K+ in attendance at the school which is a little on the small side, but isn't horrible.
My feeling is that Tarleton would be a good second football program in Texas which could help expand the MWC footprint and if handled correctly could help increase the TV contract.
Tarleton has made some big investments recently, pointing to them wanting to move up and get out of the FCS.
There's some things that make them interesting. My biggest issue and you touched on it a bit is what would they bring to a media deal.
If they had already been in CUSA/FBS for a few years and there was some type of gage on what type of viewership they might bring I'd be more excited about potentially seeing them added. Just a lot of question marks.
Yeah but attendance that exceeds the dregs of the conference not really a selling point.
No it's not..But points to how bad the bottom of the MWC is when a school none of us has probably ever heard of in FCS is out drawing them. And they just recently moved up to FCS I believe.
I dont know how adding 9am games for mostly mountain and pacific games is a good thing?
Time slots don't matter as much as people watching. You have to sell to advertisers that people will actually watch the game. Going against noon games in the east coast against schools that demand the eyeballs during a much more digestible time frame for the vast majority of the fans doesn't seem like it will help our bottom line at all.
Time slots don't matter as much as people watching. You have to sell to advertisers that people will actually watch the game. Going against noon games in the east coast against schools that demand the eyeballs during a much more digestible time frame for the vast majority of the fans doesn't seem like it will help our bottom line at all.
Here's where I see some value. You're up early. You turn on TV. 'Your Team' plays at 1pm. You can theow on pregame shows or you can throw on actual games for background noise until your game is on.
Again I don't think we can extrapolate too much for any game that was on ESPN2. It was in the bottom 5 watched games on that channel all year long, with over 70 games. Every sports bar in the country has that channel on by default. To really compare we need to see averages and really what kind of streaming numbers each team gets. To see a real fan base, see how many watch crappy broadcasts fans will watch, not look at numbers for channels that will get numbers by default.
I don't know that is somewhat flimsy.
The NFL games in Europe that start at 9:30 am, are some of the least watched games in recent history. Typically they involve some bad teams (cough, Jaguars, cough), but that doesn't change the fact that the same games get significantly more viewers when they play at normal time spots.
I just don't think that is a PRIME spot for capturing a ton of fans. I think much more people will watch college game day, vs a 9 am game for instance.
For a conference that has 90% in western time zones, more early morning games seem to be bad, not good.
