The buzz is that the contract will be extended through the 2015 season and hopefully with new announcers. This is great news for MCG as he can watch the Irish every week on national TV for the forseeable future. The new NBC slogan is: Irish football on NBC. Not AMT.
Here is the link to the news release: http://newsinfo.nd.edu/content.cfm?topicid=28367&seltopicid=3427 For those choose to criticize this arrangement, they should know about the following, which under any circumstances is very impressive:
I doubt if you will agree with me Sid, but while that arrangement of the Football program contributing to the academics of the University was certainly a point of pride and something that we could point to as making us different from "football factories". I no longer think it's a good thing. ND has a multi-billion dollar endowment and is one of the richest colleges in the Nation. At the same time our athletic programs have lagged behind in funding needed facilities upgrades. The Joyce Center has been worn out for 10+ years. Mike Brey was promised upgraded facilities when he became the ND coach 7 years ago, when he's been here 10 years they may have completed their promise. At this moment they haven't even begun though. The reason given is that they don't build anything till they have the donations (funding) at somehting like 90+. We just a couple of years ago caught up to our peers in football with the Gug, Texas has had something like that for at least 10 years. I think our Athletic Dept should fund itself from the income generated by athletics, which it does and it should be able to maintain and increase the quality of the facilities as needed. It should not have to give to the academics . It won't make people think we are a football factory, nobody thinks that of Stanford which has a seperate foundation for athletics and it raises money somewhat in competition to the Academic fundraising. If it did we would have had a renovation of the Joyce a long time ago, we would have had a Gug like facility a long time ago, we would have a decent basketball practice facility (for both men and women) they would have taken care of the Hockey team. All without compromising the academic integrity of the University. Terry
Amazing isn't it, with all that TV money, all the money generated by the stadium expansion and the addition of another home game, the school had no money to rennovate the older part of the stadium. Fortunately they were able to fix that by magicaly finding hundreds of new season tickets which could be funneled to high rollers. You may recall at the exact time these "new" seats were found they announced because of the "increased demand" senior alumni and monogram club members no longer had guaranteed tix.
Terry, you are correct. I don't agree with you. Not at all. You are mixing apples and oranges, and your priorities for the university obviously are much different from mine. The university leadership has made a decision on how it is going to spend the NBC money and how it is going to pay for improvements to the physical plant. They could have gone in the reverse direction, as you suggest, but they determined their priorities and are acting in accordance with those decisions. I'm on board with that.
I don't know why anyone would criticize the ND arrangement. I can understand being jealous tho!!! I would like to point out a small thing in case it's not common knowledge about some of the "football factories". Schools like A&M and Texas cannot mix their money. Our athletic departments are required to be fully self-sustaining and receive ZERO dollars from the state or school. All facilities, scholarships, etc are paid for by the Athletic Dept alone. Not a problem for Terry and his hi-rolling brothers on the 40 acres, but at the poor man's college we have to scrape for those dimes!! 8)
In modern athletics the top schools all have independent athletic depts, they have to fund themselves and they get to keep the profits. It's no surprise that schools like Texas, Tenn, Ohio State, Fla, Alabama, Michigan, Penn State ,etc all have large stadiums and fanatcal fans who fill them, buy lots of logo merchandise and as a result their athletic depts run a profit. They use that profit to improve the product, the facilities, pay good salaries to coaches, good recruiting budgets. etc. Classic rich get richer senario. Now at ND things like our Bowl money after the costs are paid the balence goes to scholarships as you can see from Sid's comments. So really while we earn a profit that always puts us at or near the top of all athletic depts, our competition uses that profit as they see fit. At ND we tie one hand behind out backs with regards to funding of the programs/facilities. As I said before it's noble and most fans/alumni took pride in it. But that was a different time. If ND want's to play in the big game they have to have the facilities and the budget to fund recruiting etc. Time to change, again as I said we have a huge endowment they don't need the football money to support academics. It's anachronistic, Standford doesn't do it, Duke doesn't do it, Northwestern doesn't do it. I rest my case...Sid still won't agree with me. :shock: :shock:
No....If ND wants to play in the "big game" they have to win their games on the field/court, regardless of facilities, which are far, far from chopped liver, much closer to the "factories" than the "reform police" want to admit. Also, their recruiting budget must support only the successful recruiting of student athletes who are transformed by a successful coaching staff into a successful team. What I find interesting about this argument is that years ago when ND was dominating college football and was highly competitive in BB, our facilities likely were much farther behind the "factories" than Terry's crowd believes they are today. I know that for a fact, because I attended BB games in the old fieldhouse. In fact, we played Indiana each year in Ft. Wayne, a neutral site, because Indiana refused to come into our 1,800 (maybe 2,000) seat dirt floor "cow palace", and until several years ago, ND's football stadium seated "only" 60,000. Bottom line.....It's the quality of coaching and the quality of the student athletes, not the perceived state of the physical plant, which, I repeat, is in excellent shape as is and on the road to improvement by the administration's timetable, not that of the vocal minority of critics.
From the article I was a bit surprised by the extent of mediocrity that has befallen the Irish in recent times: "the Irish have finished the season ranked 10th or higher just three times in the 17 years its home games have been televised on NBC -- No. 4 in 1992, No. 2 in 1993 and No. 9 in 2005. They have been finished ranked in the Top 25 in seven other seasons and finished .500 or worse five times." One has to wonder if the heat on Weiss will be turned up to a higher level given the new contract and the pressures from NBC to do better on a national scale.
And the Purdue game is a must win for them or they'll disqualify themselves for consideration for the BCS Championship.
The heat is already on Weis from the alumni and fans. I think if he does not win at least seven games and some kind of bowl game this year he may be in serious trouble.
The heat is definitely on Weis, he doesn't have to win 11 games or anything like that, but there needs to be very visible improvement and most likely he needs to win 8 or 9 games. He still has a very young team though so expectations are measured. I don't think he can get fired this year, but a medicore year this year and a so-so year in 2009 will most likely end his career at ND. I've been through this with Texas who was very up and down in the period between Darryl Royals retirement in 1976 and Mack Browns arrival in 1998. Terry
I suppose that this is almost a significant statistic. The fact is, that ND was in the top ten during more seasons than that. It just so happens that after the regular season ended (and the NBC telecasts were over) ND lost a bowl game and dropped out of the top 10. That doesn't mean that they weren't a highly ranked team during the season while NBC was televising them.
Stu, as far as I'm concerned, the Purdue game ALWAYS is a must win, regardless of our record or rating....or non-rating. Of course, we all know that having 3 Big 10 teams on the schedule (MI, MSU, Purdue) weakens our SOS, so even if we would go undefeated, beating those teams plus USC and others, we probably wouldn't deserve to be in the BCS championship.