Last updated on 10/11/2020
Update: The Ducks get an occasional spike, but on average it’s a solid win for Kant. In California, where UO attempts to recruit students by pitching big-time Duck sports programs with campus tours that start with Knight Arena and the Jock Box, Kant beats Altman 3 to 1:
10/9/2020: No one gives a shit about Duck Football.
UO undergrads are quickly learning they don’t need a football game to have a party. See this report in the Weekly, and this one in the Oregonian (written before the latest spike):
In Lane County, which includes the UO campus, the weekly number of new infections has exploded nine-fold since August, dwarfing the statewide rate of increase. Last week, the first of UO’s fall term, the county logged a record-breaking 245 new cases, up from 27 during the third week of August.
And in the past three weeks, 214 UO students have tested positive, virtually all of them living off campus. Four employees also have been infected.
Public health officials say they’ve been able to link much of the surge in Lane County to nine separate parties or social gatherings among university students and their peer group, ages 18-28. Officials say these young adults gathered indoors, without masks and without physical distancing, to celebrate birthdays, the end of summer, the start of school or simply to party.
And it turns out not many people want the Ducks on TV either:
"No media company wanted to partner with the Pac-12. ESPN declined. FOX, CBS, even the Discovery Channel declined. Nobody knows this. We weren’t wanted.”
— John Canzano (@johncanzanobft) October 9, 2020
Read the rest on the saga of the Pac-12 Network here: https://t.co/CQJ6CioxIu
Dude, you understand how Twitter works, right? You click on it and then read the actual article, which states: “The first six weeks of the season will be televised by a combination of ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, Fox and FS1. Fox will televise the Dec. 18 title game.” Lots of people want to watch PAC-12 football, what isn’t happening is that the networks don’t want to partner with PAC-12 TV for the non-network games. That’s interesting, but it’s not what you’re claiming, cause it doesn’t fit your narrative.
OK, so “nobody” was an exaggeration. But if you believe google search, Baking, Cannabis, Call of Duty, and Lice are all more popular search terms than Duck Football, which barely registers nationally and in Oregon ties w/ Lice for last place: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=US&q=Duck%20football,Baking,call%20of%20duty,Lice,Cannabis
Yeah, but there’s nothing about how much those networks are paying for broadcast rights for an attenuated schedule. Going further into the article, the Pac12 attempted to sell an equity share in their broadcast rights for half a billion dollars, and they get nothing. Apparently, the networks can’t find advertisers that are willing to buy whatever audience the Pac12 teams assemble. That, or those advertisers are not willing to pay the same as they did to advertise to that audience. Given the Pac12 is a P5, and there are some decent sized media markets within the conference, yeah, you’ll get someone to broadcast the games. But, again, what are they paying to do so???
Thanks Charlie, for reading that so we didn’t have to. Please contact our swag office for your complimentary UO Matters coffee cup – Phildo edition coming soon!
Thanks for your gracious offer, UOM, but I must not be swayed by swag. It’s a matter of principle…
UO averaging about 15 confirmed covid per day so far in October. Almost all students (so far). At this rate, we’ll have about 4000 by end of spring term. But it gets better. The ratio of actual infections to confirmed tested infections is probably something like 5:1. So by end of academic year, the entire UO student body actually living in Eugene will have gotten covid! I’m not making this shit up. Check out the arithmetic, it’s simple, even a University of Chicago law school dean or
a UO biology professor can get it!
Schill infamously never enjoyed football before coming to Oregon, and of course now is a huge “fan”. With all due respect, your arithmetic is missing a few dollar signs. Schill knew that his decisions would make the community sicker. He’s just paid enough not to care.
Well, I have always been naive about the intrinsic goodness of members of the human race. I am not yet as cynical as you, if you will pardon my saying so. I have alwats hoped that UO could be a model for how to handle the virus, like a few other schools. I still think they could do something about the off campus parties, which seems to be where most of the trouble is. They certainly haven’t taught the students much about distancing on the streets, let alone at crowded indoor parties. I still have hope for rapid cheap easy testing. Am not hearing much about any of this. UO seems to be in deep slumber. I doubt that President Schill is consciously imitating President Trump.
But somehow I doubt that letting everyone get infected is good box office long term. It certainly is making the staff and neighbors jumpy.
Today’s UO COVID19 Missive: “A hundred forty members of the UO community tested positive or were considered presumptive positive last week (October 5 through 11). A total of 348 members of the UO community have tested positive for COVID-19 since reporting began. ” 140 in 7 days. Impressive.
Lifelong Oregonian here. I’ve lived in several cities across the state in my forty years and I can tell you that nobody outside of Eugene really gives a shit about Duck academics, but everyone loves the football. I personally hate football in general, but it is the only reason most Oregonians even talk about the Ducks.
I’ve heard that our phones send our private conversations to Google, Apple, the NSA, and maybe China too. But I can’t find a way to search those. So I’m going to stick with the best available public Google metric: Oregonians are just as interested in lice as in Duck football, despite the fact that Rob Mullens spends a lot more on PR flacks than the lice do. You’re probably right that UO professors rank below both though.
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https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=US&q=Duck%20football,Baking,call%20of%20duty,Lice,Cannabis
If you restrict to just Oregon, you can find 1 month in the last 15 years, where duck football was more searched than those other terms.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US-OR&q=Duck%20football,Baking,call%20of%20duty,Lice,Cannabis
If you change it from Duck football to Ducks football it is the highest interest by far: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US-OR&q=Ducks%20football,Baking,call%20of%20duty,Lice,Cannabis
Here’s uomatters California analysis with the correct term as well: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US-CA&q=Ducks%20basketball,Immanuel%20Kant
You nerds! “Duck football”…smh.
But if you drop “Immanuel” and just compare Kant to Ducks basketball, Altman’s ducks do even worse:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=Kant,Ducks%20basketball
True, true. Sadly, Oregonians appear to not be devotees of the categorical imperative:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US-OR&q=Kant,Ducks%20basketball
Since this started with the Ducks supposed status as a national brand, I think we should avoid using data just for Oregon. But if we do we’ll find that Oregonian’s are more likely to search for Hunting, Fishing, and more recently Vegan, than for Ducks basketball: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US-OR&q=hunting,vegan,fishing,Ducks%20basketball
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Fish stories aside, I looked at Oregonian’s revealed preferences, as measured in dollars spent. Our DFW sold $59M in hunting and fishing licenses last year. (And that number doesn’t count the bait and bullets etc.) In comparison, Dana Altman sold just $2.4M in basketball tickets last year – only about 1/4 of what had been predicted by Pat Kilkenny, Dave Frohnmayer, and the Knight Arena boosters.
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https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ORHUNTLICTAX
https://duckweb.uoregon.edu/duckweb/bwfkbudg.P_TransparencyBudget
Bill, I am curious why do hate UO athletics so much? Why would not you publish a post titled “Americans are more interested in smelly porcupines than UO Economics (59th with 2.6 peer review score.. basically “irrelevant”). Seriously, you and your colleagues are ranked in the “garbage” category, and you attack something that UO has that is ranked regularly in the TOP10 in the nation, and people actually care about. Maybe you and your colleagues should do better research, publish more, and be better in teaching before you go after what is really good at this university. And you personally should remember that tenure is not a carte blanche for activism. Check your vita some day. Just my two cents
Well, Friend, if UO econ is top 60, it is probably top 30 among public campuses. Not Berkeley, but not exactly “garbage” in my book. Especially when you consider that it’s a small faculty. Weighted for size, I’d bet it’s top 25 or 20 even.
I get what you say about athletics — but I have to wonder, why have UO’s natural backers never tried to make it first rate academically. And I’m not talking abiut Uncle Phil.
UO has many natural advantages and pound for pound could compete, say, with Wisconsin and Minnesota. But there’s never been the interest to do so in Oregon.
I enjoy Ducks sports, but I hate the fact that college sports has evolved into a system in which most schools take $5-$30 million a year from debt-ridden, night-shift working students and then pay coaches ludicrous percentages of revenue (people say “they are just getting market rate” while ignoring that the Board of Trustees just takes more tuition dollars to pay them whenever needed, a true bailout of the rich by the poor). The Ducks are mostly good about this but the rat race of athletics will take priority if the money is needed, I fear.
Academics could learn from athletics here, who run a successful program, but is it reproducible? 1) Get donors to fund top-notch facilities, 2) pay whatever it takes to get the coach/faculty you want and if it doesn’t work out cut them and keep paying them millions. The Knight Campus seems to be close to this model so we’ll see if excellence merely requires $500 million per two dozen faculty!
Here’s an example of the soul-destroying need for cash that is modern college football. A librarian, carefully saving his modest income, bequests $4 million to UNH. Maybe a scholarship for poor kids interested in library sciences is in order? Nope, time for a new scoreboard! https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/15/494134464/-1-million-of-frugal-librarians-bequest-to-n-h-school-goes-to-football-scoreboar