Cupcakes
November 10, 2006 12:40 pm by donaldMister D’s post pointed out the well-known fact that Syracuse plays a bunch of chumps in November and December. Sure, Syracuse’s opponents are chumps — Syracuse opens up against St. Francis of New York tonight and look to whoop up on Penn or UTEP later this month. But these cupcakes are veritable giants compared to some of the other teams Big East teams are playing. Heck, at least Syracuse is playing division I opponents. Marquette opens the season against Hillsdale College. Nevermind that Hillsdale College sounds like a place high school sitcom characters go upon graduation. The real kicker is that Hillsdale is a division II team. Honestly, Marquette might as well be playing a good high school team.
It’s not just Marquette who’s beating down on the weak and downtrodden. In four days, West Virgina plays Slippery Rock, another division II team. Rutgers gets in on the division II beatdown by playing St. Thomas Aquinas on November 19th. What does it mean to be a division II team? The St. Thomas Aquinas Men’s basketball page lists as its headlines big wins over East-West University (um, how can you be both East and West at the same time?) and Concordia College of Nebraska. That was in 2005.
Other notable DII opponents include Longwood University (Beavis would like that), who go against Providence on January 2nd. That’s pushing the early-season chump rule a bit, huh, Coach Welsh? And then there’s Bellarmine vs. Louisville on Dec. 10th. Bellarmine sounds more like a furnace manufacturer than a university…
The most amusing Big East-cupcake matchup, though, is a DI team. Cincinnati plays High Point University this Sunday. Given the Bearcats off-court behavior, one has to question Coach Mick Cronin’s decision in scheduling teams. Sure, this is his first year, but shouldn’t he know his players might confuse playing High Point with getting high?
I’ll end this post with a trivia question whose answer I don’t know: why is the Ivy League the only conference who plays in-conference games on a Friday night? Looking at the schedule of Big East teams, I noticed that many of them play Friday night games early in the season, but stop once they reach Big East play. So it’s not that college basketball just doesn’t happen on Friday nights. Is it just some arbitrary rule?
Categories: Commentary, donald
2 Responses to “Cupcakes”
Why no Big East conference games on Friday night?
Answer: Television.
Friday night is one of the worst nights for sports television (or TV in general, for that matter), because most of your audience (males 18 - 45) spends Friday night out on the town rather than in on the couch. Thus, the smaller your viewership, the smaller your advertizing revenue. And this becomes an untenable situation from the standpoint of a TV network and the NCAA.
So, since nobody wants to watch Providence play Marist no matter what night it’s on, Friday night becomes a scheduling option.
But when conference play starts, and you get matchups like G’town vs. UConn, the networks want as much viewership as possible. Therefore, Friday night is out, and the colleges will schedule those games when men are generally home–on weeknights (e.g. Big Monday) or on Saturday afternoon.
Monday night - Man, monday was tiring as always, but good news, because I only have to wait 3 hours until I get to see the Raiders battle the Seahawks on Monday Night Football. (This is when you can start humming the theme song). Let’s face it, it was a bad game, no wait, a terrible game! But I still watched.
Tuesday night - OK, I didn’t watch any TV Tuesday, but if there had been a good game on, I definitely would have.
Wednesday night - All You Can Eat Wings night! So I go to the bar and watch some random NBA game while I cram my face full of as many Hot Wings as I possibly can. Disgusting.
Thursday night - After dinner, I settled in to watch the Rutgers-Lousiville football game.
Friday night (tonight!!!!!) - UConn’s first game vs. Quinnipiac, but I probably won’t watch it. It doesn’t matter what’s on TV, because in a few hours I’ll be on my way downtown to party it up. The only chance I might get to watch some is if a couple of the guys come over to pregame before we go downtown and we watch it then. But my priority is clearly not the basketball game.
The point is, on any other night, I’m sitting at home watching UConn vs Qunnipiac, a terrible game. Or worse yet, Raiders vs. Seahawks. But on friday, not so much.
Perhaps the Ivy’s play on firdays so much because most of the students are too smart to make some bad decisions every weekend. As for me, well, I went to UCF.
Care to comment?