In Reply to: tOSU has half a dozen or so 'outlets' dedicated... posted by ClockBlocker on August 22, 2024 at 12:11:21
Yes, I see some truth in your view. It's a circular dynamic where low performance suppresses fan interest (since 1998) resulting in low quality, opportunistic media coverage. Morgan Center is the hub of that wheel, and our current media wholly supports them even after they drove the athletic department into bankruptcy. Not a single peep about the chronic, yawning financial "deficit" at Morgan Center.
But what happens at tOSU during basketball? My guess would be that fan interest drops and so might the intensity of the media coverage since tOSU is not a consistent basketball power. (We see this across town, for example.)
Ucla, stupidly, has decided to identify with basketball not football. Morgan Center transmits a football vibe of "we'll do our best", but the central message is that football is tolerated for the money, while in basketball the expectation is set at the championship level and basketball is celebrated as Morgan Center's brand-aligned sport and team.
Thank you John Wooden, but this choice will prove to be financially disastrous.
Ucla also ardently supports the Olympic sports even though they eat money and are mostly obscure. These "elite" sports flatter Ucla's view of themselves as "elite" people and in their Brahmin view of the world, these "elite" sports burnish the Ucla brand. This is all an expensive, vain, low T hallucination.
Nothing would do more for the Ucla brand than to win the national championship in football. Whatever skill and moxie Morgan Center once had and could bring to bear to push Ucla to the top of the sport 40 years ago has atrophied and disappeared.
Our current Morgan Center has devolved into a government services bureau attuned to receiving gifts of free TV money, but they have no ability to earn any of it. They couldn't run a lemonade stand let alone put forth the talent and strength it will take to climb to the narrowing top of an increasingly commercial and competitive business.
All throughout the Bruins' 5 - 10 year stay in the B10 we'll see giant, well known universities that would wallow in the backwaters without the power their football programs bring their schools' brands. Where would Penn State be had Paterno stayed at Brown? It'd likely have remained a distant, small rural outpost akin to ND State. (The only reason I know of ND State is because of their football program.)
We have poor Ucla media because we have a mediocre football program. And...that is by design.
We have an institutional crisis here, not the wrong coach or the wrong seating scheme at the venue. We have a leadership vacuum, a testosterone and energy deficit and a lack of will. We fans and the proud history of Ucla football deserve far more and far better than these slackers running the program will ever be capable of providing.
We need big, positive, energetic pro-football changes at Morgan Center or we might eventually go extinct in championship level D1 football. The now seemingly endless flow of free TV money will certainly begin to run dry, breaking the current Morgan Center government bureau model. When that day inevitably arrives, as the true Brahmin would say, we risk becoming Untouchable.