One of the first football games I went to at the University of Wyoming was against Brigham Young University. The taunts hurled in their direction from the student section are not quite fit for a family publication.
In any case, the Cougars of BYU are leaving the friendly confines of the Mountain West Conference after this season, choosing instead to strike it on their own as an independent, opting instead for the West Coast Conference for all sports besides football.
This move is huge for the fledging WCC, which is made up of private religious schools that are similar in size. Having recently opted not to expand as recently as June, the conference changed its tune quickly when the possibility of BYU joining fell into their lap after the collapse of the Western Athletic Conference.
Most of the fallout seems to be that it doesn’t make any competitive sense for BYU to do this. Except, none of the realignment moves that have happened this year have absolutely anything to do with competitiveness. They have everything to do with money. College sports fans desperately want to believe in the purity of the game, because it makes them feel better when contrasted against the backdrop of holdouts, lockouts and performance enhancing drugs of the pro ranks.
This move makes a ton of sense for BYU in the short term. It’s unlikely the BCS Board of Directors will give BYU much in the way of concessions related to access to BCS bowl games beyond the standard “finish in the Top 14” that they had while in the Mountain West. But the school can schedule whoever it wants. They’ll have help, partnering with ESPN to broadcast their BYU-TV games and that will help tons to create some marquee matchups. Still, the BYU name doesn’t have the same cache as Notre Dame (even if BYU has been a lot better over the past decade) and it’ll be difficult to convert eyeballs west of the Mississippi.
Still, the Mountain West’s horrible TV deal was the sticking point here. It was hampering BYU’s own goals with marketing itself. Worst case scenario, the two parties kiss and make up within a decade in some kind of new conference realignment. Best case? BYU has great success and manages to position itself beyond what it could’ve done as a member of fledging leagues.
I’ve been hypercritical of the Mountain West leadership for being conservative during the quiet period. Boise State should’ve been invited years ago and they would have been smart to position that league well before Utah had a chance to bolt. But their missteps are coming back to haunt them now. The league will be a 10-team league next year, which is still one team more than they’ll have this season. But it wouldn’t surprise me if they found a way to expand to 12 teams before the dust settles.
No matter what, the league they’re inheriting isn’t as good as the one they are leaving behind. Meanwhile, the WAC will need a hail mary to ensure it’s own survival. I suspect UT-San Antonio will join the league and at least one other Texas school to prevent the defection of Louisiana Tech, but if Hawai’i decides it’s easier to be an independent too, they might have a difficult time scrambling to convince half a dozen FCS schools to move up in a few years, since many of them will need to add sports to qualify at that classification.
To really illustrate BYU’s quibble, the MWC television network (The Mtn.) is only available on extended packages via cable and DirectTV sports package. Meanwhile, BYU-TV is available on the basic tier of DirectTV, meaning I could conceivable follow BYU football anywhere, whereas the Mtn. would be an added expense.
I think this move is smart, proactive and low-risk because people aren’t looking at it with the right lenses. It’s all about the dollars and cents and long-term, it makes a lot of sense and cents for BYU to make this move.
We’ll see how it goes, I guess.
Despite the obvious comparisons between the age groups, this summer has been transcendent because it’s the first summer I’ve been in a management position at camp rather than just in a leadership role managing an activity and kids in a cabin.
Camp has been a big deal for me; I’ve done it for every free summer I’ve had as an adult doing it. I also have a very difficult time explaining my camp life to people. To the uninitiated, summer camp is something you see in movies but have little context for, but for those who’ve experienced the peculiarities of sleep away camp, they understand that it’s one part quirk and one part culture. Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner was so affected by his camp years that he wrote a book about it.
Just like I have a hard time conveying to friends who’ve gone to college but never worked in higher ed the strangeness of things like hiring cycles, the way offices work and so forth. Well, camps have their own culture with strange songs and dining hall practices, wake up schedules and activities that may or may not be understood to an outsider showing on a regular day of camp.
The most notable thing that summer camps have to teach higher ed is pride in being who you are. Take a look at the web site of any summer camp and see how they present themselves. Few are apologetic and most have no interest in trying to convert those who don’t want to be converted. They know who they are and have a history they can chronicle for you.
Now I realize there are a variety of differences ranging from no faculty, only a summer to worry about rather than years and years. But with younger children spending what amounts to the entire childhoods in some cases away at camp, the influences and relationships they make in these venues can dwarf the college years.
This explains why so many campers end up as camp staff in the future and have such devoted loyalty to their summer homes years after they’ve left, send their children to their places for generation after generation. Of course, the hard work gets done on the recruiting trail during the year at conventions and conferences akin to higher ed. And imagine if you had to re-hire your entire faculty and staff each year from food services, to janitors, RAs, faculty and everyone else who ran your operation save for a few full-time staff?
This is a topic that I’ll probably write more extensive about after the summer ends, but it’s taken me an entire summer to really wrap my mind around how much goes into making these places work season after season.
Currently reading.
I read this book in a few hours because I really appreciated the way it was arranged and view it more as a reference book. The lessons it contains were instructive and while they’re applicable to a variety of settings, industries and institutions; the lessons contained for higher ed were plentiful.
Among them were:
Build an audience. So much of what we write is boilerplate. Rather than engage people or even challenge them, we take the easy way out writing institutional-ese that doesn’t seem to connect with the people taking the time to know our organization. What a shame.
Own your bad news. Transparency is not the strong suit of many organizations, because they just don’t know how to handle spreading their own bad news. There’s a way to ensure that people know what you’re trying to do, why and how you’re trying to do it. The bottom line is, if you’re honest with people they’re more likely to understand and if you break the story is deflates a lot of the air from it and gives you the opportunity to play offense rather than just defense.
Press releases are spam. Spreading the good news about things happening within your walls isn’t a nuisance. But finding the gems requires the sort of work that we’re often slow to do, because there’s never enough time, there aren’t enough people to find them and folks don’t want to talk. So we skim for the stuff at the top rather than digging deep for the oil that lies beneath. We can do better to tell our story and share our cultures and it begins with the stories we choose to share.
There were so many stories in the book that I found to be useful lessons worth keeping in mind. Things I’ve learned from my own experiences, messages I’ve preached on my own before reading the book; as well as things I otherwise have trouble with and need reminders of.
We can streamline how we go about our business and create a more nimble and effective workplace that achieves our goals even better than we set them out on paper but it has to start with those empowered to make those changes.
I think I knew this summer would be mentally exhausting. But I underestimated to the extent this would happen. I expected to write more and read more, but those things take a lot of discipline from me…more the writing than the reading. I’ve blazed through books, but I’ve found it almost impossible to focus on writing anything substantive.
I have no idea what any of this means, but I think I’m probably annoyed by how much energy I’m putting into things that I can’t really see any long-term benefit to. Maybe the good news is, this summer has put on display my work ethic. I have a great deal of confidence in my abilities when the circumstances are tailored for me to succeed.
In other words, I get into a role where I can do great things and where I’m supported to this end. I’ve seen both sides of this, but I’ve never been able to articulate this before. Some roles are tailor made for you to succeed, but success is elusive when you’re not aware of your strengths or how to better improve on the areas where you’re not as strong.
I feel like going forward, there are lessons that will emerge that I’ve yet to make sense of at this very moment.
Over the past year, I’ve learned a lot more teaching social web strategy and discussing web tools with people whose lives aren’t consumed with it than I ever did working in the field directly. Sometimes, you have to engage with your consumers and your audience and I’ve found this extremely helpful.
One of the things I remember talking about a lot last year from teaching my class to consulting to helping the SocialWyo folks plan their conference was the fact that you can have 50,000 foot discussions about this nebulous social media creature and go nowhere. Ordinary people with lives and work and jobs might use Facebook and maybe they’ve created a Twitter account. But no one in their everyday lives has made any of these tools really relevant to them in a manner that they can understand the real origins of web utility; as opposed to a telephone or radio or something like that.
I’ve enjoy conversations that force me to tone down the jargon, avoid the cliches and spend more time talking about the meat and potatoes of the topic without powerpoint slides or a backchannel. I think I’ve thrived as a strategist over the years precisely because so much of my circle was comprised of savvy people who are digital outsiders; coupled with a professional circle through the web of smart people who have their thumbs on what’s going on and keep me on top of things.