BOWLING GREEN — The 82nd installment of the Toledo-Bowling Green rivalry featured all the usual trappings of MACtion.
Bands playing. Points flying. Hot cocoa — and $7 Miller Lites — flowing. The only thing missing? Anyone watching.
Remember Wednesday and the Rockets’ 66-37 beatdown for the bone-chilled night the Mid-American Conference’s television deal officially jumped the shark.
I’m not sure which was worse: the two-thirds empty Doyt Perry Stadium or a TV audience less than that of an overnight airing of Happy Days.
ESPN thought so much of the league’s best feud that it slotted the game for ESPNU at about 8 p.m. We say about, because the network had the contractual option of sliding the start time back further, in case the Southeastern Conference volleyball match that preceded it ran long.
I mean, come on. (Note: This is not a knock on volleyball.)
ESPN — and the MAC — either needs to value this rivalry enough to broadcast the game on one of its main networks or leave it alone to be played on a Saturday afternoon in October where it belongs.
The point of weeknight November games that ignore the interests of local fans is the national exposure.
Since MACtion as we know it began in 2004, the previous six UT-BG games played on weeknights aired on ESPN or ESPN2, thus assuring a modest viewership and, to a degree, rationalizing the inconvenience for fans.
How do you justify this one?
A game that should be a raucous civic celebration not only had little atmosphere — the contest so ill attended that the 50-50 raffle total ($3,700) was smaller than the sum of some high school games — but tepid viewership.
History suggests the audience consisted of Toledo and Bowling Green diehards, a few thousand football radicals in Alabama, and pets whose owners have died. According to a review of ratings data from the industry website Sports Media Watch, weeknight MAC games on ESPN2 last year averaged 423,600 viewers. Games on ESPNU — which is available in some 18 million fewer homes — averaged a Blutarsky-esque 0.0 rating and 136,200 viewers.
If that still sounds like a lot, for perspective, we combed the cable ratings for last Wednesday. A 2 a.m. rerun of the ABC sitcom The Goldbergs had 428,000 viewers on Nickelodeon.
My humble advice to the MAC: Leave our game alone and buy ad time on The Goldbergs instead.
Our schools, the fans, and the rivalry deserve better.
Look, I understand ESPN offers exposure that aids in recruiting. A marquee game or two a week in primetime this time of year would be great.
But the MAC — and its member schools who signed a deal that pays the league about $10 million per year — never knows when to stop.
We’ll say it again: With this season’s unprecedented November weekend blackout, league members breached the fundamental pact it holds with the students, boosters, and tax payers who underwrite their product.
Honest question: If the civic sporting event our area so looks forward to is played on a damp, wind-swept weeknight with nobody — OK, almost nobody — watching, what is the point of having a money-losing athletic department at all?
Remember, a few TV bucks hardly changes the game financially for schools outside the power conferences. In the 2015 fiscal year, the Toledo athletics department received $15.27 million in subsidies from the university, Bowling Green $12.9 million.
Sure, the reason universities sponsor sports is to provide many great opportunities for hundreds of scholarship athletes, but it is also to bring our communities together. Evidence last year’s rivalry game. It was perfect. On a Saturday afternoon in October, tailgates filled the sun-soaked Toledo campus and a crowd of 30,147 packed the Glass Bowl.
Even with Bowling Green again down this year, a big crowd no doubt would have turned out had it hosted the Rockets on a nice October weekend.
“I can’t worry about things I can’t control,” Bowling Green coach Mike Jinks said, “but I’ll say this to the powers that be. It sure would be nice to get [Toledo] on a Saturday and return the favor like they got last year. That atmosphere really made it. It was a beautiful afternoon. Being on a Saturday, this rivalry in my humble opinion deserves that. That’s maybe something that can be discussed.”
The discussion can’t come soon enough.
Contact David Briggs at dbriggs@theblade.com, 419-724-6084, or on Twitter @DBriggsBlade.
First Published November 16, 2017, 3:35 a.m.
