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'Send it in Jerome!' Turns Twenty

Posted: Jan 25th 2008 12:01 AM ET by Sportz Assassin (RSS feed)
Filed Under: Pittsburgh Basketball, Big East Basketball, NCAA Basketball Video, Pittsburgh, ESPN

0 COMMENTS

Long before we had to hear Bill Raftery talk about player's onions or that the team was playing man-to-man or that someone's puppies where moving as he hit a shot with a kiss ... we had "send it in Jerome!"

Pitt's Jerome Lane shattered a backboard on a dunk against Providence on January 25th, 1988 ... twenty years ago. The dunk got Raftery animated and he shouted the now famous "send it in Jerome". I was 12 when this happened and remembered ESPN's SportsCenter replaying it over and over and over again. I was amazed that someone could break a backboard that didn't have a nickname like 'Chocolate Thunder'.

By the way, Sean Miller is the one that passed the ball to Lane. Miller is now the head coach of Xavier.

To Raft, who will still see all over our college basketball games ... here's to you! To Jerome Lane, wherever you are, here's to you!

Useless Content From the Big East at $80/Year

Posted: Oct 4th 2007 11:16 AM ET by Charles Rich (RSS feed)
Filed Under: West Virginia Football, Big East, Rutgers Football, Pittsburgh Basketball, Connecticut Basketball, Big East Basketball, NCAA Basketball Media Watch, NCAA FB Media Watch

1 COMMENT

Last month the Big East website moved from being hosted by CSTV to JumpTV. This was part of its new deal with JumpTV to produce the Big East's new multiplatform broadband environment. The offerings include.

-- A branded broadband video channel (http://www.BIGEAST.tv), which will offer annual, monthly and seasonal championship packages along with game-of-the-week football contests
-- An official photo store
-- An official mobile store including mobile alerts
-- Online auctions

Of course, the broadband offerings are actually quite limited on BigEast.tv. Oh, sure you can get field hockey, swimming and soccer, but is anyone really going to pay the $79.95 annual subscription fee for that and being able to watch the weekly conference propaganda show on a computer?

The thing people will want is the football and (especially) the basketball content. Well, that is a little trickier.

Pitt's Logo Goes from Bad to Worse

Posted: Jun 18th 2007 9:36 PM ET by Charles Rich (RSS feed)
Filed Under: Pittsburgh Football, Big East, NCAA FB Campus, Pittsburgh Basketball, Big East Basketball, NCAA Basketball Campus, Pittsburgh

6 COMMENTS

As a loyal Pitt alum, I keep waiting for the athletic department to finally give up the ghost on the "Panther Head" logo (along with the boring and bland navy and gold and just go back to the old colors, along with the script "PITT" but that's a different rant). The Panther Head logo introduced back in the mid-90s (on the left) was accurately described this way:

...the panther-head thing on the helmet looks like Beowulf's Grendel as drawn by the troubled comic book fan at the back of the class.

The only good news is that this thing has been relegated to a "secondary" logo in the last two years. The present, primary logo is a block-lettered "PITT." The bad news is that they are still trying with a new style of the Panther Head as shown on the right as the secondary logo.

As expected, the Pitt message boards are less than impressed with the new logo. Since I didn't like the old Panther Head that much, it's hard for me to get too worked up over the newer version of a secondary logo I would like to ignore. About the only good thing to write about it, is that it is less detailed in contrasting colors which made the older version look like an unidentifiable blob when shrunk too small or viewed from a distance. Then again, that might be the bug in the new design rather than the feature.

UPDATE: The picture of the new logo came via Panther Rants blog. Apologies for the lack of credit.

Mixed Bag of Big East Cash

Posted: May 30th 2007 9:54 AM ET by Charles Rich (RSS feed)
Filed Under: Louisville Football, Pittsburgh Football, Syracuse Football, West Virginia Football, Big East, NCAA FB Campus, Rutgers Football, Georgetown Basketball, Pittsburgh Basketball, Connecticut Basketball, Marquette Basketball, Louisville Basketball, Villanova Basketball, Syracuse Basketball, West Virginia Basketball, DePaul Basketball, Seton Hall Basketball, Cincinnati Basketball, Notre Dame Basketball, Big East Basketball, NCAA Basketball Coaches, Louisville, Pittsburgh, Syracuse, West Virginia

5 COMMENTS

An interesting piece talking about the Big East revenue distributions (via Big East Basketball Report).

While the Atlantic Coast Conference recently awarded its 12 schools an average of $10.85 million for the tax year ending June 30, 2006, the Big East awarded its eight full members an average of $5,842,599.

The Big East average has fallen for the last three years. For the July 1, 2003, to June 30, 2004, reporting period, when Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College were still members, the average was $6,794,029.

After the ACC's raid, six Big East schools (including BC, but not Tech nor Miami) received full football-basketball share averages of $6,445,968.
...
Overall, the Big East's total revenue went from $74,800,951 in 2003-04 to $62,641,685 in '04-05 to $75,411,511 in '05-06. So over the tumultuous three-year period, the league's revenue increased - but only $610,560 in a healthy sports atmosphere.

Some of the fluctuation, though, had to do with television and radio rights fees earned by the league. In 2003-04, the Big East made $25,910,626 in fees. In '04-05, after the defections, it dropped to $15,349,543 before rebounding to $19,225,441 this past reporting period.

There was never any doubt that for the first few years after the revised Big East, that the football revenues from TV would be down. The first year after everything that happened was simply about trying to remain part of the BCS coalition.

It could be argued that only a few of the football schools took significant revenue hits in the first couple of years. Half the football schools were coming into a new conference.