A while back, there was a Guardian article on corporations claiming ownership over videos in the public domain:

But one titanic problem with ContentID has received little attention: the use of ContentID by those who falsely or incorrectly assert ownership over public domain works – works that have no copyright at all – and then either block access to the videos, or collect the advertising revenue from these videos.

FedFlix is a charitable project launched by Carl Malamud, a “rogue archivist” who raises funds to digitise and upload videos created at US government expense. Under US law, government creations are in the public domain and can be freely used by anyone, but the US government is remarkably lax about actually making its treasures available to the public that owns them.

Malamud’s group pays the fees associated with retrieving copies from the US government – sometimes buying high-priced DVDs that the government issues, other times paying to have unreleased videos retrieved from government archives – and posts them to YouTube, the Internet Archive and other video sites, so that anyone and everyone can see, download, and use them.

Malamud’s 146-page report from FedFlix to the Archivist of the United States documents claims that companies such as NBC Universal, al-Jazeera, and Discovery Communications have used ContentID to claim title to FedFlix videos on YouTube. Some music royalty collecting societies have claimed infringements in “silent movies”.

Here is more on FedFlix.

One of the ostensible reasons for SOPA and Protect IP is that it provides an undue burden on content IP owners to find and locate every single instance of copyright infringement. One of the main pushbacks against SOPA and PIPA is that it would apply an undue burden on the part of user-generated sites to approve each and every piece of content that someone uploads. And what we have hear can validate each argument. The content producers’ recklessness can at least potentially be attributed to having to scan over so much material that they get some things wrong (if we are to take the most benign explanation). And the burden that the sites face make it so that they simply don’t have time to straighten things out (this benign explanation is, I believe, more reasonably applied here).

But what jumps out at me here is the difference between a right you have and a right that is respected. I’ve mentioned this before with regard to the TSA. It doesn’t matter what kind of rights you have if they are arbitrarily ignored. In fact, it makes it worse because at least rights you are denied have to be justified somewhere along the chain. To use the TSA example, if they are going to force all milk-bottles to go through an X-Ray machine, the TSA has to make the case that this is safe and necessary. If you have the right to have your milk bottle not go through the machine, but they penalize you for ever asserting this right, then they have effectively made a rule without justifying it.

So here we have a case where videos that CBS and Discovery do not own are being flagged. Their ability to claim ownership over these videos has never been justified. The ability to post these videos is, at least in theory, granted because they are in the public domain. In practice, however, there is simply no way to actually assert this right without being severely penalized. This applies to more than YouTube videos. You are theoretically in the right if you choose to make and release a Little Mermaid video. However, if you choose to do so, Disney can turn around and claim that you infringed not on the Little Mermaid that exists in the public domain, but their variation of it. They may have absolutely no case, but if ABC/Disney sends you a letter saying that they are going to use all of their legal might to run you out of business, are you going to risk it? Are you going to pay thousands and thousands in legal fees to emerge victorious… and broke?

I am considering a superhero project. In it, I would love to use some of the (few) superheroes that have fallen into the public domain. But these have been used by the Big Boys. The Big Boys can make all sorts of arguments (similar to Little Mermaid), and once they get to court, I’ve already lost. And so while I have the right to use these heroes, I am not free, in any meaningful sense, to actually assert that right. And so I won’t.

Copyright carries with it loads of ambiguity and logistical problems. Either they have rights that are extremely difficult to enforce, such as a proliferation of videos on YouTube that they have to have taken down one by one or thousands of BitTorrent downloaders that they have to single out (and get a lot of bad publicity in the process)… or we have rights that are difficult to assert. The theoretical, but constantly challenged, right to back up content that we own. The ability to actually own, rather than merely rent, works that we buy. The right to upload material that nobody owns the right to. This creates a real zero-sum environment wherein either content producers have insufficient ability to enforce their copyrights, or an ability so broad as to create real headaches for people tagged with false positives.

And where you sit is where you stand. It becomes worthwhile to ask questions about how much we - the consumers - can actually trust the content owners to behave ethically. Their apparent entitlement to endless copyrights, and their willingness to engage in shoot-first-ask-questions-later tactics, and their propensity use the money they make to lobby for laws that reduces access to the public domain, makes me inclined to restrict their power as much as possible. Even if, as they claim, it has a detrimental effect on the arts in the long run.

This post is at least partially about the new TV series, Boss. It will contain little in the way of spoilers and will also not require you to have actually seen the show.

In the beginning of the first episode, Chicago Mayor Tom Kane (Kelsey Grammer) is hit with what may be the worst medical diagnosis there is, something called Lewy Body. It’s a cross between Parkinson’s and Alzheimers. His body, and his mind, are betraying him. His time left as an independent, cognoscente person is perilously short. The show is about Grammer’s attempts to conceal his illness and reaffirm his political power in the face of various external and internal threats.

It’s not The Wire, but I thought it was a really good show. If I were Tom Kane, though, it would have likely been a very boring show. It would have been a show about using my last day’s to assure a stable and ordertly transition into quiet retirement. Kane, though, fights on. The only transition he tries to manage is to replace Governor Cullen (Francis Guinan) with young upstart State Treasurer Zajac (Jeff Hephner), and rather than backing down from politics, he throws himself further and further into it. The notion of backing down, or losing, never occurs to him even to the point where he does something that left me literally uttering “Oh, my god.” It becomes apparent, as the show progresses, that Kane has little or nothing to retire to. He is in a loveless marriage and he and his wife both disowned their only child in the name of political expediency. There are some attempts to reconcile with his daughter, but that’s about as personal as he gets.

The whole mentality is rather alien to me. That’s one reason why I would never have a successful career in politics.

Of course, I look back at some political figures in astonishment at the degree to which they went the opposite track. There was a young politician in Colosse, Alex Leventis, who had an astonishing career ahead of him. Some were saying that he could go on to become president. A moderate Democrat, he was thought highly of across party lines. Then, in an announcement that everyone assumed was going to be for a gubernatorial bid, Leventis announced his retirement from politics. Nobody had any idea why. Less than a decade later, Leventis was in prison.

The bizarre thing about the Leventis story is what it came to be apparent did happen to him. He fell in love with a stripper. Apparently, an avaricious one. And in an attempt to make her happy, he did things in his political office that he shouldn’t have done. He retired to go to the private sector (and so that he could marry a former stripper without cocking as many eyebrows) and made more money there until his past caught up with him. The guy that everybody loved suddenly had no friends. He’d burned his bridges with Democrats by being something of a maverick. He’d burned his bridges with Republicans by being a Democrat. The stripper left him while he was in prison.

Leventis and Kane represent opposite sides of the political spectrum. One who threw it all away for the woman that he loved and the other held on tight in part because he loved nothing but what he had.

A minor pet peeve in TV shows. For various reasons, they often use fictitious entities like universities and sports teams. I know why they do it and I don’t mind at all (says the guy who fictionalized the entire United States of America). But if you’re going to do this, jot down the name of the entity you created and use it in the future.

I’m watching an episode of Cold Case, where they have a fictitious Penn University. Not to be confused with the University of Pennsylvania, which they used in a previous episode (I think in that case it was referring to the real Penn). Having these two coexist doesn’t sit entirely right, but I wouldn’t make waves about it. What does bug me, though, is that Penn U’s mascot is the Jaguars. That bothers me because another episode had a Pennsylvania University with a mascot of the Warriors.

People. It’s a single show. This is not like asking DC Comics, with its dozens and dozens of titles under scores of writers/artists, to keep things straight.

Las Vegas was also really bad about this. UNLV existed in that show, but then they would have “Nevada State University” (there is a Nevada State College - little more than a community college - but no NSU) in a plot involving a crooked card-counting professor. Then, a season later, they had Las Vegas State University. This isn’t quite as bad as the above since NSU, LVSU, and UNLV can all co-exist, but would it have been too much to ask them to dip into the same well when they needed a fictional U?

On the other hand, Law & Order, despite spanning several shows, was actually decent about using the same universities repeatedly. They were less good about sports teams, however. giving New York two additional basketball programs.

Over at NaPP, I am in charge of the weekly trivia question. I thought I would reproduce it here.

This week’s question is going to be a little trickier than some, so I am going to give out several hints at once.

Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Vermont have none.

There were roughly 650 of these in 2006 in the entire world, on every continent but Antarctica. There are over 700 now.

There are roughly 150 in the United States. Over a third of these are in one of three states.

Canada has roughly 20, with one in most provinces.

Direct answers here.

I am watching and enjoying the show Revenge. However, I am a bit behind on it. I’d like to look up the filmography of some of the actors, but I don’t want to spoil anything and by knowing how many episodes they appear in, I’ll know something I shouldn’t. So if someone could copy and paste the filmography of the actors for these three characters on IMDB, I’d be really grateful. They all look familiar, but I can’t quite place them:

Daniel
Lydia
Frank

And this is important: Please remove any reference to the show Revenge.

Thanks!

There are a few I haven’t seen yet, and I’ve only seen one or two episodes of a few shows, but so far, this fall season has stunk to high heaven as far as new comedies go. I’m not sure there are any that I am going to watch on a regular basis save one: Man Up. Which I will watch a handful more episodes of, because that’s all there are. It has, of course, been canceled.

Man Up is one of three Men in Crisis shows coming out, which the press has made a big deal of. I haven’t seen the other two. One has not only already been canceled, but has already gone off the air. But Man Up is, or was, a winner. Partially because it’s not the woe-is-manhood demonstration that it was cracked up to be. The first episode centers on masculinity as the main character, Will Keen, tries to deal with what to give his about-to-be-a-man son. But from there it’s a three-sided buddy comedy with Keen, Star Wars fanatic Kenny, and mildly effeminate Craig.

The fourth guy in the picture is Grant, who is the boyfriend of Kenny’s ex-wife. Grant is the Total Package, as far as men go. He’s muscular, intelligent, excessively friendly, and both masculine and sensitive at the same time. He is sort of the metric that Keen, Kenny, and Craig find themselves trying and failing to match up against. I was afraid that Grant was going to be a one-off character, but it looks like he’s around for the long haul. He reminds me of some of the people I’ve known where you kind of stand around and try to figure out a reason that they’re not better than you, and all you can come up with is that they are irritating in their perfection. And that sort of suffices.

Keen’s relationship with his wife is partly - but only partly - the typical responsible-wife-helping-husband-along that you see in sitcoms. But Will Keen is competent enough, and Theresa Keen good enough, that I don’t find it particularly grating. Rather than simply rolling her eyes at her husband, works with him and tries to understand where he’s coming from. It’s a bonus that TK is played by Teri Polo, who is always pleasant to watch.

Kenny is a bit more stereotype than person and I would expect that over time that would be worked upon. His ex-wife is the second main-stay female. There is an interesting dynamic between the two of them where they were playground sweethearts and fell in love before either of them realized that she was way out of his league (landing her with Grant, who ought to be way out of hers). Bridgette is the “slutty friend” (to Theresa) and also needs to be worked on, character-wise. Craig is something of a non-entity thus far, mainly rounding out the set.

But thus far, the show has been funny without being excessively predictable. And though it rely on awkward moments, it has yet to get painful to watch as other laughtrackless comedies sometimes get. So it’s a show to keep an eye on, which is more than I can say for the other shows. Which, of course, means it has already being canceled.

My complaints about the other shows:

Whitney - The title character is irritating as hell. I like the boyfriend okay, though the reviews say he’s irritating as well and I’ve only seen the first episode. Excessive laughtrack, also.

Up All Night - I didn’t warm to either of the characters. I didn’t find it funny. It’s slow. Also, a show where the main character(s) are in the TV biz has a strike against it.

New Girl - Yes, Zoey Daschanel is quirky cute. I don’t know how worthwhile it is to build an entire show around that premise, though, and the supporting cast is roundly obnoxious.

2 Broke Girls - Spoiled Rich Girl meets Streetwise Poor Girl. Except the rich girl isn’t rich anymore. And they’re not girls, they’re cardboard stereotypes.

Okay, so I’ve only seen four new shows. But that’s a pretty low average, and these are the ones I thought I might like.

New York Magazine has an interesting slideshow on the ratings of various shows. These are what I thought were the highlights (Quotes are in italics):

Men and women are more in sync about Two and a Half Men, however: It’s the No. 2 show on TV among both men and women. // Really? The Gamesters are going to have a field day with this, bad boy Charlie Sheen (even if he isn’t on the show anymore) and all that. This is one of those shows that I really thought would tilt pretty heavily in the male direction.

Not counting football, NBC has zero shows in Nielsen’s list of the 40 most-watched shows on TV. // There really is no end to the bad news of NBC doldrums. Given the success of USA (owned by NBC) you wonder at what point they don’t just start taking USA show ideas and putting them on NBC instead.

NBC may not have a lot of viewers, but the viewers it does have are well educated. The Peacock boasts eight of the top ten shows with the greatest concentration of adults 18-49 with four or more years of college. // This doesn’t surprise me. For a network nobody watches, it’s #2 among the shows I watch. So that’s good news, but…

TNT’s Rizzoli & Isles, with nearly 9 million viewers, is the most-watched scripted show on cable this season, and its overall audience is bigger than every show on NBC save SVU and Harry’s Law. // And Harry’s Law “doesn’t count” because its viewership is old. I’ve been meaning to watch HL, but the more I read about it, the more I fear that the politics of the show will make Boston Legal pale in comparison. Notable tidbit: Kathy Bates replaced James Spader as the headliner in a David E Kelley legal drama (albeit not the same show) and Spader replaced Bates on The Office. I’ve seen a couple episodes of R&I, and while it’s not bad, I don’t for the life of me understand the popularity. I guess I’m not the target audience.

Young women hate nerds: Among females 18-34, the lowest-rated scripted show on any network, including the CW, is Chuck, with a 0.7 rating. // So they’d rather be watching programming where the women are the butt of jokes rather than where an alpha chick falls in love with a nerdy guy. Gamester vindication, again.

The network show rich people like the least? Fox’s Cops, which averages a mere 0.6 rating in upscale adults 18-49. // No further comment.

Via Microsoft’s help page:

* Changing the drive letter of the system volume or the boot volume is not a built-in feature of the Disk Management snap-in.

* Many MS-DOS-based and Microsoft Windows-based programs refer to specific drive letters for environmental or other variables. If you modify the drive letter, these programs may not function correctly.

With this in mind, why in the world would Microsoft ever, ever have Windows assign the boot drive as anything other than C:? Seriously, because now Windows is installed on the G: drive and I have a lingering suspicion that a lot of applications are not going to like the C: being a removable disk drive for SD cards. How hard is it to make sure that Windows, when there is no other OS installed, always has the drive it is installed on as the C: drive?

In any event, a valuable lesson learned. Historically, I disconnect all other drives when I am reinstalling Windows. But I couldn’t remember why I was doing it other than the vague fear of a drive getting formatted over. Well, now I know why I am going to need to do this in the future, I guess. I wonder if this is one of the reasons why I did this before.

Cold Case is a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine. As far as cop shows, it’s a rather ludicrous one. It exists in a world where almost nobody ever actually lies to the cops. Almost nobody asks for an attorney, and if they do, the detectives ignore the request despite the fact that they are typically interviewing middle-to-upper class people (another thing… which we will ignore at the moment) whose lawyers would be able to make hay out of it. I guess that takes care of itself, because it also exists in a world where everyone eventually confesses, though that’s hardly unusual in TVLand.

What I enjoy about the show is less the police work, though, and more the following of the victim’s life and the life of those around them. It’s a character drama with a badge, mostly (several badges, actually).

The basic premise, as the title suggests, is that it’s about a bunch of cops picking up old and dormant unsolved cases, ranging everywhere from the 1920’s to a few years ago. One of the tells that a character didn’t do it is if they have some sort of criminal record. By and large, the one who did it is the loving husband who lost his temper, the boss, or something else like that.

Almost almost never did they actually commit much of a crime after the original crime that the team is investigating. This makes the case-closing actually depressing in some respect. Half of the time, the murder was a mistake. Technically murder, but a physical struggle where the victim fell backwards or something. In the case where the guilty one was indeed a criminal, it’s typically the case that they turned themselves around after the incident in question. So, as a matter of justice, maybe it’s a good thing that they’re being put away. But it’s still a little sad for an upstanding National Guardsman or working joe to be taken away long after it might have done society itself any good.

One time they took away a guy who killed his uppity housewife fifty years after the crime occurred. The guy had Alzheimers and barely remembered any of it anyway. Another case - one of those of a physical tussle gone awry - the guy lived his entire life mourning his dead wife until the police take him away.

It’s hard to take a whole lot of satisfaction in that.

I suspect that college coaches everywhere are wondering just how far in advance you can start buttering up potential recruits. There are limits to how much contact you can have with high school recruits, but what about elementary school ones?

More seriously, it’s an interesting story. Commentary for some on how cushy-cushy our society has become. This is actually not the most simple of cases, though. If you instituted a mercy rule, the kids’ games might be over in a quarter or two. And at that level, playing to play is one of the things that ought to matter. That’s made less fair when a team has such an extraordinary advantage.

I admit it, I am a sucker for England Dan and John Ford Coley. I am embarassed by a lot of the old sappy stuff I like, but ED&JFC actually holds up for me.

Jim Croce is hit and miss with me, but this one was a hit, as far as I was concerned. It, too, holds up.

I was going to throw in a Paul Davis song, but he doesn’t have the mustache (the full beard doesn’t count).

Toledo cries foul:

Toledo wants Syracuse’s 33-30 overtime win against the Rockets to be vacated after a Big East Conference official acknowledged that replay officials wrongly awarded an extra point for a kick that was no good.

Toledo athletic director Mike O’Brien says he has asked the Mid-American Conference commissioner to request that the Big East give Toledo the victory.

Toledo made a field goal to force overtime Saturday, but the Orange came back with a field goal to win. The Rockets are upset because video showed Syracuse narrowly missed an extra-point attempt after an earlier touchdown. Officials who reviewed the kick let the extra point stand.

I feel for Toledo. This would have been a big win for the program and, indeed, they probably should have won. I say “probably” because there were two minutes in the game and if Syracuse had been up by two instead of three they might have had some extra urgency on stopping Toledo’s final field goal to put the game into overtime. The thing is, we’ll never know. That, to me, is another reason not to change the results of the game as it was played.

Several years ago when Southern Tech was playing a game against ESU where the conference title was (more or less) on the line, we got robbed on a particularly bad call as we were working towards the endzone to take over the lead in the final minutes of the game. The ESU defense had clearly not gotten off of the field. Flags were down everywhere. Our quarterback, who knew this, took the opportunity to throw a pass into the endzone to see if it took. Knowing that there would be a replay on the down. It was intercepted. The problem was that the flags that were down were for something on our side. ESU declined the penalty and got the ball on their twenty. They got a couple first downs and the victory formation and that was the end of the game.

It’s not exactly the same, because we hadn’t actually scored the touchdown (but there’s no question that we would have, we were on a roll). And arguably the QB shouldn’t have made the assumption on the flag. But just as clearly, there were 13 defensive men on the field. But that’s simply the way that it works. You pick up and move on. You don’t change the score after the fact. Much less the outcome or even the point spread. Human referees are an element of the game. If you don’t want them to matter, put yourself ahead by enough that they don’t.

A few weeks ago the Pac-12 did retroactively change the score on a game between USC and Utah. It didn’t change the results, but did change the point spread (to the collective groan of bookies everywhere). That was made worse by the fact that this was based on a new rule regarding celebration penalties that I do not believe should exist.

Late last season, in another game involving Syracuse, there was another excessive celebration penalty that ended up throwing the game over. And, of course, there was the Ty Willingham incident, where sports-writers everywhere were just outraged on behalf of Ty Willingham, only suddenly realizing that excessive celebration penalties can be kind of silly when the target is a media darling
.

A few seasons ago, it took Oklahoma fans half a season to stop demanding a reversal of the Oklahoma-Oregon game where the (Pac-10) refs consistently made mistakes in Oregon’s favor. It was actually the whining over that when I started digging my heels on the subject.

Historically, I’ve been against even so much as the Instant Replay, though over the last few seasons they have done a bang-up job of speeding up the process so that it’s not intrusive. The downside to that, of course, is that things like the above get missed. I wonder if a part of it is that the replay officials know the original call. Maybe what they ought to do is strip it of its context (”This is the game-winning field goal”) and strip them of knowledge of the original call. From there, they decide one way, the other way, or too close to call. And if it’s too close to call, they go with the original call. That would be harder to do with somethings (such as when there is a ref with arms signalling a touchdown or a good field goal in the footage), but I wonder if sometimes these mistakes are made in too great deference to the refs on the field. It seems that almost all of the weirdest calls are actually where they stand by the refs.

We Need More Dogs!

Tommy West’s exit speech from Memphis. It’s not as colorful as the previous video, but a good call-to-arms to a school that needs it.

His successor went 1-11 and laid a huge egg against Sun Belt team Arkansas State a couple weeks ago and is 1-3 with its sole victory against a lower division team and a combined score of 44-154 (excluding the lower-division game: 17-127)

Maybe you had to go through presentations like this in school, but I not only literally laughed out loud when I saw this (which I don’t generally do), but I laughed myself red.

My main thought, upon watching the last episode of last season of the office was: Let it be James Spader! Let it be James Spader! Sweet Lawrd above, let it be James Spader! Now granted, I am a Spader fan from his appearances on The Practice and Boston Legal, so I was anything but biased. But even with that, his character was just awesome. Ray Ramone’s was good, too. I didn’t like that British woman. But James Spader’s character was amazing.

But I knew it wouldn’t be James Spader. Everything appeared to be falling in place for it to go to Edd Helms’s character, Andy Bernard. It was the natural extension of things. Helms had recently broken the barrier to being on the opening montage. They’d already gone there with Jim and Dwight. The only other candidate was Darryl, and the way the episode shook out they explained why the qualified black guy wouldn’t get the job. It was his turn, so to speak. But not only was Spader’s character more interesting from the viewer standpoint, he was also by far the best candidate that they interviewed in the show.

So imagine my surprise when it did go to Spader! Sort of. Spader is going to be a regular guest star, having gotten the job and immediately been promoted to CEO. I assume that Andy gets the Office Manager job, thus making me part-right and part-wrong.

The only really disappointing thing about Spader’s character is his name: Rob California. Even though the pretext of it being a documentary is laughable, one of the things the show has done up to this point was giving us real, if exaggerated characters. With real names. Michael Scott. Jim Halpert. Andy Bernard. While some works of fiction go out of their way to have “interesting” names, The name “California” sticks out like a sore thumb. More than D’Angelo Vickers did.

As most of you (who care) know, Two And a Half Men is replacing Charlie Sheen with Ashton Kutcher. I commented before that they could not have asked for a better drop-off point than they had. Charlie Harper and long-time obsessor-neighbor Rose were going off to New York (or was it France?) together. All they had to do was leave it at that. Charlie’s gone, kept in some sort of bunker with Rose, who won’t let him leave out of fear of what her non-existent, obsessive husband Manny Quinn might do.

But no. Instead, they’re killing off Charlie Harper. This strikes me as a matter of Chuck Lorre simply being spiteful at the expense of the story. The buying of the house could just as easily be done due to creditors going after Charlie’s assets after his disappearance. And it would have been a more fliud story, with what happens next following what happened previously.

So, color me disappointed. It’s gone from a show that was going to be high on my list by the curiosity factor alone, to one that’s going to be as low on my list for the next season as it was for the previous.

What English sounds like to non-English speakers. I have to say, I think they do a pretty good job with it.

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban was last known in the college football world for trying to set up a playoff system. He certainly had the populist (albeit wrong) side of that argument. However, his latest on conference realignment represents a tremendous misunderstanding of how college football scheduling and television works, as well as a curious misunderstanding of basic mathematics. I know that we’re all supposed to bow before his fly-by-the-pants wisdom, but I can barely get past his “problems” to get to the justification of his solution. Taking the problems in order:

1. More schools will NOT mean more TV money. … Maybe the SEC has an escalator in their contract that increases the total value of the TV contract, but I’m guessing that it still will result in a reduction in the dollars paid to each school when compared to the amount paid had an additional school not joined the conference.

Either the SEC has an escalator or they believe that the temporary losses outweigh what they will get when it comes time for renegotiation. It doesn’t take a “guess” for this to be the case. We can be relatively certain of this because of what the SEC is doing. They are throwing themselves into uncertainty for a midling-performance Big 12 school in a media-rich state. I am more inclined to believe that they know what their contract states and if it meant losing money, they wouldn’t do it. I’m not one of those people that believes it is “all about the money,” but in this case there is little reason to do what they are doing except for the money. They don’t need expansion. They don’t need A&M’s performance. They are doing this because it improves their situation. Could they be wrong about that? Sure. But not in the obvious way that Cuban suggests. I suspect that they have covered that angle.

2. Fans will hate the scheduling impact … I’m guessing that the only way to get all those games through a single TV network partner is to start very, very early or to go very very late. … Which is exactly why the big networks are very supportive of the Super Conferences. They know they will be able to force matchups OFF of tv and on to internet based broadcasts.

This is where mathematics comes into play. Between the major conferences, there are (or will be, next season) 68 BCS teams of note (counting TCU, which enters the Big East next year, and Notre Dame). Depending on how everything unfolds, there is likely to be roughly…. 68 BCS teams of note when all is said and done. Maybe more (if a couple more teams get brought in to round out a BE+B12 merger) or maybe less (if a couple of teams get left out and have to go down to the likes of the MAC or Conference USA). Cuban overlooks something very basic here… the demise of the Big 12 (as we know it) will leave a huge, gaping hole in college football scheduling. One to easily be filled by the slightly larger conferences elsewhere.

3. Say Goodbye to Cupcake Football Games … With every school added to a conference they are going to have to remove a cupcake to make room on their schedule. Coaches are going to HATE this. Of course the smaller schools are going to lose their pay day as well.

Nonsense. This assumes that every team within a conference must play every other team within a conference. We already know this isn’t true because it’s already not the case. Conferences limit themselves to 8 or 9 conference even when they have ten or more teams. The same would apply if they went to 16. The only difference is that, in a Pac-16, almost all of the games would be intra-division. The old Pac-8 would spend seven games against fellow old Pac-8 members, and then one or two against eastern division teams. This isn’t rocket science. It’s already happening.

4. Goodbye Geographic Rivalry Games I don’t care how good a game OU vs Oregon could hypothetically be, fans from both sides are going to second guess the economics of going to the games. And if it’s an off-year for either team, then what ?

As I said above, Oregon would spend over three quarters of its conference games against old Pac-8 rivals. Only one or two of the opponents would be outside the Pacific time zone and teams that they have not been playing for decades. He’s not quite as far off the mark here, though, as you will have teams in Arizona and Oklahoma in the same division. But Oklahoma would be in a division with four former conference rivals in addition to the three in Arizona and Utah. I think they can live with that. The losers in this arrangement are actually Arizona, Arizona State, and Utah, who would be cut off from their California ties. I am actually genuinely curious why these three, in addition to Colorado (who was in a losing situation in the Big 12 and would not benefit from a B12-like situation) and Stanford (who can’t be salivating at the likes of being conference-mates with Oklahoma State and Texas Tech), would go for this. My guess is, contra #1, there is a lot of money at stake.

As for his A&M example, it’s true that they are switching out a number of Oklahoma and Texas schools in favor of southeastern, but it’s not like Louisiana is Pennsylvania. They are an outlying team, but the state borders two SEC states and Arkansas, which he also cites as a team out of its geographical depth, borders three (four if Texas A&M joins). But, apparently A&M feels as though its current conference arrangement has left it overshadowed by schools that are too similar and being in the SEC would give them a way to separate themselves from the pack. This is not exactly an unusual attitude, as Florida allegedly is less than enthusiastic about letting Florida State join because being in the SEC is a competitive advantage for UF. Separating yourself from in-state rivals is pretty common. Twenty years ago, A&M and Texas were both in a conference that was almost entirely in-state. It didn’t work out.

5. Big Dogs Hate Becoming Little Dogs In a huge conference a school that was once a “leader” in its conference will inevitably become an also ran. They will be the school that used to get national games that now is relegated to the internet broadcasts or a small coverage regional game.

This one actually isn’t far off the mark, at least as it pertains to A&M-to-the-SEC. It’s often been mentioned that Texas A&M may have trouble competing in the SEC. But Arkansas made the transition from conference leader to middling school and apparently has no regrets. Being in the SEC has meant more exposure to them than they had in the Southwest Conference and arguably what they would have had in the Big 12. That last part is less certain though. It remains to be seen how well the teams departing for the Pac-16 do when playing Arizona, Arizona State, and Utah rather than Baylor and the Big 12 North schools. Oklahoma State and Texas Tech have reason to be concerned, but they’re likely to be the tagalongs (at least, they hope they will be) and go where UTex and OU go. UTex and OU would be just as likely to be dominant forces in the Pac-16 east as in the Big 12.

Now, these are more legitimate questions for the four or five schools left behind in the Big 12. They could restock their shelves and become conference leaders, or (more likely) scramble to join or merge with other conferences. Either way they are reacting rather than acting. They would almost certainly prefer the Big 12 stay in tact. It’s just that their opinion doesn’t really matter.

As for his justifications for staying put, they are similarly wanting. I’ll go through these more briefly:

1. The Big12 becomes the AL East of College Football. Texas vs OU has the same cachet and regional and national intensity. If either team moves they will have a difficult , if not impossible time replacing the quality of this rivalry. What’s more, the remaining teams because of the quality of the programs can quickly evolve into significant rivalries

This is only true if they separate, and something I am sure they are both considering. But they played each other out of conference before, so there’s no reason that they can’t do so again (unless Texas were to join the Big Ten, in which case more of his arguments would apply, but nobody is talking about that right now). Because, as previously mentioned, more conference members does not mean more conference games. Anyhow, this is the status quo. It has its advantages, but it also has its limitations.

2. Money, Money, Money Probably the most important reason to stay in a smaller Big 12 is that fewer schools means more money to the conference. The Big 12 is looking at a new TV deal in just a few years. … Their TV partners want quality, marquee games with national significance. That happens with the top 2 to 4 teams in every major conference. It doesn’t matter whether your conference has 9. 12. 16 or more members. There are only 20 teams in the Top 20 and 10 in the Top 10.

It doesn’t matter, though, whether those top 20 teams are split between four conferences or six. You’re still dealing with the same number of teams. And the Pac-16 east is likely to be roughly the same as the Big 12. Arizona and Arizona State will likely be in a better position, since the Pac teams are historically better than the Big 12, but for the others it’s likely a push or only a little bit tougher. A 9-3 team is likely to be ranked whether they are the #3 team in the Big 12 or the #3 team in the Pac-16 east and #5 in the Pac-16 as a whole.

And here’s the other thing. The fewer top-tier conferences there are, the more leverage they have with ESPN. ESPN could afford to blow off one of the top 6 conferences, if it came down to it, but they cannot afford to blow off 1 of 4. And a single 16-team conference could provide the entire sports programming for an NBC Sports Network. Indeed, the CBS Sports Network is built off a 12 team mid-major conference, two independents, and periodic games from another mid-major conference. A Pac-16 spanning from California to Texas or Missouri offering to give all of their first-tier rights to CBS or NBC Sports would make the network and pose a real threat to ESPN’s monopoly.

This is why ESPN was one of the parties anxious to keep the Big 12 together, Cuban’s protestations notwithstanding. ESPN and Fox both really stepped up to the plate to renegotiate a contract that they were under no obligation to renegotiate, because they see the threat of bidding wars with 4 conferences to be that much more intense than with 6.

3. Out of Conference TV Ready Games Fewer teams in the conference means more opportunity for out of conference games.

No. See above.

4. They Can Pay Players Larger Stipends or Start an NFL Like Development Fund The Big 12 can take the 20mm, 25mm or whatever the amount that would have gone to Texas A&M and do any of the following or whatever else they can think of …

They could do that now, without dipping into the A&M departure fund. Larger stipends would be a drop in the bucket. This is a separate issue.

Conclusion:

None of this is to say that I like the idea of superconferences. On the whole, I don’t and would rather the Big East and Big 12 expand to 12 a piece and call it a day. However, what I want doesn’t matter. The Pac-16 could seriously benefit the schools involved. Or it might not, though hardly for the reasons that Cuban cites. The main concerns would be for specific programs like Arizona and those left behind. And those are schools that are vulnerable in part because they lack influence. As for the schools with influence? Well, they all have their own agendas, monetary and otherwise. And unlike the pro sports leagues, there is no central governing authority that can tell them what to do (unless they have a tribal mascot).