Act Now, Before The SEC Smashes Your Computer
Now that the Southeastern Conference has established its dominance over the rest of college football, it’s now turning its attention toward smothering the internet with a pillow.
The SEC’s television deal with ESPN made national headlines a year ago. But as the SEC on ESPN debuts this fall, the conference’s policies on new media are starting a brush fire across the Internet.
As the New York Times pointed out on Thursday, the real issue is with video. The SEC and ESPN don’t want bloggers messing with game footage, because that’s what they hope to sell to fans in many different ways. And in order to make that happen, the SEC is choosing to crack down new media. The problem is, college football has been majorly influenced in the past 10 years by exactly what the SEC hopes to muffle.
Moreso than other sports, college football wouldn’t be what it is today without the Internet. Just ask the creators of fireronzook.com. That site earned a whole chapter in Stewart Mandel’s excellent “Bowls, Polls and Tattered Souls.” And there’s no doubt that recruiting websites like Rivals and Scout have altered the game forever. Blogs are the third leg on that stool, and they’re especially adept at creating highlight reels and mash-ups on YouTube.
Without bloggers who devote their hours to the obsession of college football, we might have missed this, this and this along the way. And if those bloggers are severely restricted in using game footage, we could never look back on jump passes, miracle plays and cleat-removing blocks.
More importantly, access the game footage gives fans a much-needed outlet when there’s controversy. Just imagine how Missouri fans would have taken to YouTube after the fifth-down play against Colorado. And there’s no doubt Miami fans would have protested even louder over the 2002 National Championship game if they could call up the replay anytime they wanted. We won’t even mention how Stanford fans might have utilized YouTube back in 1982.
Streaming-video might have even helped conferences go to instant replay. So why are the SEC and ESPN being so Big Brother about this? Since it’s big-time college football we’re talking about here, then it’s obviously about the money. Instead of cracking down, they should look toward how other sports have handled this. And they wouldn’t need to look any further than NASCAR.
This year, NASCAR created the Citizen Journalists Media Corps. It’s a motley band of bloggers from sites like Racingtoday.com and Frontstretch.com. The sites are run by people ranging from seasoned journalists to hardcore fans, and they’re all given access to the races so long as they pay their own way.
The SEC should draft its own version of a citizen media group. Give the bloggers access to the press box and let them get some face time with the athletes. Sure, there will be some homerism, but you get that with traditional media anyway. Hand the bloggers some guidelines for professionalism, and let them go at it. The content they’ll produce will have the passion and the depth that you can’t always get in traditional media.
But what to do about the video? It’s another easy fix. The conference should make it a competition to create the best highlight reel or video commentary each week. Make it part of the SEC’s website, or even better, put it on ESPN. The blogs would go crazy for it, and they’d churn out more original pieces than the local TV stations could put together.
As Keith Jackson might say, the SEC is closing the barn door after the horse is long gone. The Internet and streaming video is too much a part of college sports to clamp it up now. If the SEC wants to make best use of its content, it should be giving bloggers more access, not less.
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