Is SEC football the 21st Century "New York" Media?
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
When we were kids, the New York media was a big deal when it came to sports. I knew this before I could even pick out New York on the map. You heard about it constantly, how certain players couldn't handle the media circus surrounding the teams, how certain managers weren't suited to big city pressures. The New York media was a cliche before I even know what the word cliche meant. Now, in the wake of Lane Kiffin's debut, I think it's time to ask whether SEC football has eclipsed every other league when it comes to media attention. Especially if you combine that with the fan interest in those media reports. It's time to acknowledge that the SEC is the New York sports media of the 21st century. Just as we all knew every moment of intrigue surrounding New York and their sports teams--even if they weren't that important--so too are we all going to know every detail about SEC football.
Lane Kiffin is 33. Love him or hate him, no one can argue that he hasn't been exposed to big-city media before. At USC he was the offensive coordinator for several years, in the NFL he was the head coach of the Oakland Raiders. 12.9 million people live in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. That's more people than live in the states of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Arkansas combined. Over twice as many as live in the LA market as dwell in the entire state of Tennessee. Yet in one week of coaching at Tennessee Lane Kiffin has gotten more negative publicity than Pete Carroll has gotten in several years at USC. Why? Because the level of interest and national media attention given to each statement, notwithstanding the relative size of the markets, is much more intense in the SEC.
The Raiders are one of 32 NFL teams. They play in Oakland, across the bay from San Francisco, in one of the most fertile regions on earth for media attention. Each week Lane had frequent media availabilities for NFL media from across the country. He played before one of the NFL's most legendary, albeit insane, fan bases in the country. Yet, no one in the country knew that Lane Kiffin's wife Layla was smoking hot. Not one person. That's just a minor example. Two days after his hire at Tennessee Iwoulddolaylakiffin.com was up and running. Prior to the crazy press conference when Al Davis announced he was firing Lane Kiffin, most people had never heard a single quote from Kiffin.
In less than two months at Tennessee, the entire country has heard from Kiffin. You can argue that this is because Kiffin has been saying incendiary things or attempting to garner headlines, but I think that misses the point. Were the comments really that extraordinary? Steve Spurrier made even more incendiary comments last decade. Nope, the SEC media, buoyed by their new multi-billion dollar national television partners at CBS and ESPN, has now become the most closely covered 12 team league in America. And with billions of dollars in television contracts spoken for, the intensity of that coverage is only going to grow.
It used to be that fan interest alone governed the amount of coverage that SEC football received. And that fan interest has often been insatiable. For instance, more fans attended regular season games at Tennessee, Florida, Auburn, Alabama, LSU, and Georgia football game in 2008 than attended any NFL team's games. That's one of many reasons I think there's a real argument to be made that more people care about college football in either Tennessee (population 6 million) and Alabama (population 4.6 million) than in the entire state of California (37 million). Put it this way, in 2005, when Lane Kiffin was offensive coordinator at USC, LenDale White, with Pete Carroll's encouragement, threw a dummy off a building near the practice field in a fake suicide attempt. Most of you never even heard about that. Those who did laughed it off. Can you imagine what would happen if Kiffin did this at Tennessee with Eric Berry, Saban at Alabama with Julio Jones, Meyer at Florida with Tim Tebow?
The market for SEC football is insatiable when it comes to every product. Much to the chagrin of some New York publishers. (When we pitched Dixieland one publisher responded, "But SEC fans don't read." She wasn't even joking.) Look at the 2007 college football books that sold the best, John Ed Bradley on LSU, Bruce Feldman on Ole Miss, and me on SEC football. All SEC books. But that's only serving a market that already exists.
What we're seeing now, and going to continue to see, is a market where not only must interest be sated, the size of the markets have to grow. With nationwide television contracts it isn't enough that every fan in the SEC wants to constantly consume SEC stories, nope, it's imperative that fans across the country be inundated with SEC stories and SEC conflicts. Why? So they're more likely to watch the televised games on ESPN and CBS. ESPN has a built-in conflict of interest, they have to make the games they carry as interesting as they possibly can for an audience of people that didn't grow up obsessed with SEC football.
It used to be a conference argument. No more. SEC football is the default national league.
Don't believe me? Look at it this way, come next season more people will be able to watch the SEC football teams play nationwide than are able to watch an out-of-market NFL team play. Think about it. Say you're a Miami Dolphins fan who lives in California, good luck turning on your television come Sunday and watching your favorite team play. Unless you subscribe to DirecTV (which the vast, vast majority fo the American television public doesn't), you're probably out of luck. Your only real option to watch your team is to pray that they're the national telecast in the 3:15 spot on Sunday afternoons, the national game on NBC in the evening, or the Monday Night Football game. Otherwise you're stuck watching your regional telecast. Not so with the SEC. Unless you're a Dallas Cowboys fan at best, best, you might get three or four games on your regular television all season long.
SEC football under the new television contract? You'll be able to watch every game if your team is one of the top six in the league. 7 or 8 on television even if your team is a bottom-feeder. It's the National Football League, but their telecasts are still regional. It's the Southeastern Conference but their telecasts are now national. You do the math. College football just went national. And we're all going to be hearing a ton more about SEC football.
Lane Kiffin just learned how intense this coverage is going to be last week. I suspect a lot of players and coaches are going to be learning this in the near future. It's a new era in SEC football, for better or worse we're the New York media of the 21st century, y'all. Labels: sec sports media of the 21st century claynation clay travis sec sports rise
Posted by Clay Travis at 3:21 PM
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