This really was the next logical step. One wonders what took corporate America so long to figure it out.
In a college football era ruled by silly sounding things like the galleryfurniture.com bowl and The Rose Bowl presented by AT&T, it's not much of surprise that naming rates would spread to the regular season.
The SBC Michigan-Ohio State Classic. Or the SBC Ohio State-Michigan Classic, depending on where the game is being played.
That's what took place Monday as it was announced that the annual Michigan, Ohio State clash will now be sponsored by SBC Communications. The $1.06 million deal lasts for two years and will pay out $530,000 to both Big Ten schools. In exchange, SBC gets its name attached to the game as well as advertising on the scoreboard and around the home stadium on that Saturday.
As is typically the case with the issue of the commercialization of the collegiate game, Michigan coach Lloyd Carr and Ohio State coach Jim Tressel lay at the opposite end of the spectrum.
Tressel sees it as a means to an end -- being able to support the tremendous costs of running an athletic department. Every bit of additional revenue helps.
"Anything we can do to help our department and run as comprehensive a department as we can run, anything we can be a part of to help with overall cost, we're on board with," Tressel said on yesterday's Big Ten teleconference. "We're all realistic to the point that advertising and commercialization has become a part of our culture and this seems like a way that both athletic departments can get some help."
Carr isn't opposed to the idea outright, but is not a proponent of issues that increasingly move the college game into a more pro-sports mentality. The Wolverines coach is very much against the proposed addition of a permanent 12-game schedule to increase revenue and did say that he prefers this type of naming rights deal to a 12th game.
These issues, he said, are inevitabilities.
"I don't want to get into it other than to sat I think some of the things we're doing and the directions we are taking speak too much to money and are all things that go into putting more and more pressure on the people that compete," Carr said.
"And I'm not talking about coaches, I'm talking about the kids, the students, that play the game."
Carr added that perhaps if he were also an athletic director, he may feel different on the matter. One man who is in such a position of being both a football coach and athletic director, Wisconsin's Barry Alvarez, just learned of the deal yesterday.
"That's interesting," Alvarez said. "Everyone's looking for new revenue sources and that's certainly creative. Good for them."
Look out for Zook
The aftershocks of the University of Florida's firing of coach Ron Zook midway through the season reverberated throughout Big Ten coaches, particularly Indiana's Gerry DiNardo.
DiNardo had been fired from his old job at LSU during an off week before the Tigers' final game and he elected to not return, unlike Zook who will be finishing out the rest of the season for the Gators.
"My situation was a little different from Ron's," DiNardo said. "I thought it was the best for everyone and the players. I would have been ineffective as a leader with my power more or less taken away. I think Ron should do what he thinks is right. If I was in the same situation as Ron I may very well have decided to say on."
Zook, in his third season as coach of the Gators, was facing extraordinarily high expectations following in the shadow of school idol Steve Spurrier, and the breaking point came in Florida's 38-31 loss to 24-point underdog Mississippi State last Saturday.
The Gators are 20-13 under Zook but he was still fired, a fact that alarms some coaches who feel fortunate not to have been hired in the age of 24-hour criticism from the Internet and talk radio, increasing pressure on major colleges and their budgets.
"Certainly I'm glad I don't work for the president of the University of Florida," Carr joked. "That's my first thought. The truth is we've just gone a direction in intercollegiate athletics where money drives everything."
Quotable
Michigan State coach John L. Smith on his fondness for the Paul Bunyan Trophy, which will be on the line when his Spartans play arch rival Michigan Saturday:
"That's what we're playing for? I dunno anything about it -- it's never really been around here. We don't even have pictures of it around. It might be the ugliest trophy in the history of trophies."
