A CTE teacher's blog about teaching, sports & entertainment marketing, life, and other assorted topics. A long, circuitous career path has now found me teaching Sports & Entertainment Marketing in North Carolina. I was in the Marines and the TV business prior to teaching--told ya it was circuitous! And yes, I do ramble!
...for an NFL QB to wear another team's gear out in public.
Colin Kaepernick, QB of the San Francisco 49ers, wore a Miami Dolphins hat to a July 4th party last week. I've seen various columnists and pundits say this is no big deal, but it is.
I used to bite my tongue when my students would claim to root for one team and then show up for class with another team's gear on. I'm as big a sports fan as anybody, and only the teams I root for have a place in my closet. I don't even wear swag from my former employer anymore. What if a member of the Bloods decided to wear blue one day because it went with his jeans?
This PBS Frontline video is nearly two years old, but much of it still rings true today. The Ed O'Bannon lawsuit against the NCAA is still making news, and UConn's low graduation rate kept it out of the Big East and NCAA tournaments this month. Still, it's only two years old.
I used to be dead-set against players making any kind of money off their athletic prowess in college. College sports started with the same intent that high school sports did, to offer young men a worthy athletic pursuit in the midst of their academics. Of course, that model's been dead for a long time now--the first cheating I heard of happened in the '40s when World War II vets came home and given cash to play for one school instead of another.
What really turned me into a recent concert of compensation for players is the warp speed in which conferences are re-aligning, and how schools are leaving behind decades of tradition for a few more million dollars of a more recently negotiated television deal (looking at you, Texas A&M and Maryland). It's gotten to the point that my students look at a conference map and can't understand how schools from such different part of the country can be part of the same association. And they're right, it doesn't make sense.
I don't support paying college players while they're in school--they still get a scholarship, and everyone not getting a 'ship bemoans the high cost of higher ed. I do think they are entitled to some post-school compensation for their likeness being used in video games (see the O'Bannon case) and a cut of jerseys sold with their number on them.
The odds of any of this happening. Well, it depends on the lawsuit, I believe. Looking at the video, I don't see the NCAA changing its mind in the near future.
I showed my students this piece about counterfeit NFL jerseys. I knew that they are out there, of course, but I thought fake jerseys were confined mainly to the outside of football stadiums. I should've figured that some counterfeiters have their own websites that look remarkably like the NFLShop.com site.
It's a given that counterfeiting is wrong, but $200 for a jersey does seem a bit much. Just as a 20-year-old CD shouldn't cost $17.99. Some of these pricing decisions push consumers away from the real product and to a knockoff at a quarter of the price.
Friday was the 35th anniversary of the premier of Star Wars--I was wondering why it was on Spike that night!
A blog on the Washington Post's web site describes the cultural impact perfectly: the movie was one of the first summer blockbusters (along with Jaws). Not only did it make money on ticket sales, the movie generated billions of dollars in merchandise. I was one of those kids that had the action figures, lunch boxes and Halloween costumes.
Nowadays, it's a given that a summer movie will have a ton of licensing tie-ins, but let's take a moment to salute the pioneering money-making of Star Wars!
Congratulations to the Auburn Tigers for winning the BCS championship last night, the fifth straight SEC team to do so. The cynic in me wonders how long it will take the NCAA to vacate the 'ship. With USC, it only took five years.
In the meantime, Auburn should get some serious coin from merchandising sales. According to CNBC's Darren Rovell, Auburn already has 175+ championship items for sale. And I noticed that prior to the game, a #2 (Cam Newton) jersey was selling for $125 in stores around Glendale.
One final thought: for all of the vitriol that annually surrounds the BCS, once again the game delivered money and ratings. The ratings from the game were the largest ever for a program on cable television, and StubHub actually had to shut down ticket sales for the game last week due to overwhelming demand.
