👤 The Phillies Want Your Face

For as expansive as the internet is, it’s also the most predictable place on Earth.

This week I posted a video about a high school volleyball coach who allegedly fat-shamed her players and my comments were predictably flooded with high school wash-ups saying “tHaT WaS caLLeD cOaChInG iN My dAy.”

And I already know what people are going to say about this week’s first topic. My prediction is at the end, let’s see if it matches your response…

Anywoo here’s what we have this week:

🗞 The Big Story: The Phillies Want Your Face

📉 Biggest Loser: The Heisman is MIA

🏆 Winner’s Circle: College Football’s Newest Trophy

⬇️ Listen: What do the Oakland A’s, Prison Rodeos, and Baseball TikTok all have in common? Find out on Sportonomics…

🗞 The Big Story

When most Americans hear of face scanners in public areas they think of a dystopian communist China that uses social credits to control its citizens, not of the Philadelphia Phillies. Until now…

The Big Idea: MLB is rolling out a facial recognition feature at Citizens Bank Field that allows fans to enter the game without a ticket via a face scan.

How Does it Work:

• Fans 18 years or older opt into “Go-Ahead Entry” on the MLB Ballpark app, where they would normally scan their tickets

• You take a selfie in the app

• That selfie instantly assigns your ticket to your face

• When you arrive at the stadium, you just walk in through a special line that scans your face on the way in, instantly verifying your identity

Why Does it Matter: If you consider the amount of time it takes for someone (especially in the demographic of baseball fans, *cough old people) to pull out their phones, find their tickets, or unfold the printed-out versions - it likely takes a minimum of 30 seconds, on average.

Multiply that by a sold-out crowd of 43,000 and that’s a lot of wasted time.

But what if you could cut that 30-second average down to 10 seconds? Well, then you’ve just gotten people in the stadium faster which means more time for them to buy stuff and less money you have to spend on people working at the gates.

📉 Biggest Loser

Week 0 of college football was lackluster at best.

There were a lot of blowouts and low-ranked matchups. However, it was helped by the fact that the No. 6 ranked team in the country was playing, led by their Heisman-favorite quarterback who’s also projected to be the top pick in next year’s NFL Draft.

The only problem? 99% of the country couldn’t watch the game, and it was no accident.

Who’s to Blame: The short answer is the Pac-12, that’s because when they created the Pac-12 Network in 2012 along with all the other Power 5 conferences they did the one thing no one else did.

They opted to handle all of the production on their own.

Instead of working with Fox, like the Big 10 did or ESPN like the SEC, Big 12 and ACC did, the Pac-12 let their universities own the network. This was great for revenue splitting because everyone got a bigger piece of the pie, but it was awful for distribution.

All Opposed Say ‘Nay’: Twice, once in 2015 and then again in 2018, the school presidents turned down distribution through DirectTV and ESPN. This left the network to only be available on Fubo and Sling - not exactly highly trafficked TV providers.

The rationale for rejecting the other deals was that the university presidents thought they could get more money in 2024 when their other media deal was up, but the Pac-12 won’t live to see 2024.

A Competitive Disadvantage: As schools like USC and UCLA saw how much money schools in other conferences were making from their media deals, they realized they’d start falling behind unless they jumped ship.

This led to both So-Cal schools joining the Big 10 last year and the rest of the Pac-12 exiting stage right soon after.

Post-Mortum: What ultimately did the conference in was its own hubris. They thought they could “always get a better deal” and never just took what was in front of them.

And now, in their dying breath, the Pac-12 gets to screw us all over one more time by putting USC and Caleb Williams on their awful network.

🏆 Winner’s Circle

College football rivalries are unmatched for their tradition and trophies but not every school has one, at least not in their conference. Enter: Nebraska.

November 20, 2014: A University of Minnesota Goldy Gopher fan account tweets at Faux Pellini, a popular Nebraska fan account, looking to place a wager on the teams’ November 22 matchup.

What starts as a joke turns into a wager that includes $5 and breaking a chair over Goldy Gopher’s back.

Some fan took this exchange rather seriously and mocked up a trophy for the upcoming game.

November 21, 2014: Goldy Gopher is seen with Version 1 of the aptly named $5 Bits of Broken Chair Trophy.

November 22, 2014: Minnesota beats Nebraska 28-24 and retains the trophy.

October 17, 2015: Nebraska beats Minnesota 48-25 and their coach snaps a picture with the unofficial rivalry trophy.

November 12, 2016: #21 Nebraska beats Minnesota again 24-17, but the trophy is nowhere to be found. What’s worse is that some players didn’t even know they were playing for the $5 Bits of Broken Chair.

2017: Fans on r/CFB and r/Huskers team up to recreate the trophy to its exact dimensions. Fans also agree to start donating to a Nebraska and Minnesota-based charity as a part of the rivalry game.

2022: The $5 Broken Chair Trophy has helped raise $125,000 for Team Jack and the Minnesota Masonic Children’s Hospital, and the trophy lives on to this day.

All-time record: Minnesota -  6 wins, Nebraska - 3 wins

_{*This was written before the August 31st game between the two teams}

⏱ In Other News

• This might be the worst view in sports.

• Did Amazon lie about TNF ratings?

• The NFL, NBA, and UFC are teaming up to fight pirates.

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👋 If I had to guess, most comments on the facial recognition topic will involve some variation of “The government 😤🤬👿!!!” 

We’ll just have to wait and see, Happy Friday!