UM’s Kennedy Keeps His Lips Zipped Regarding SEC Schedule
January 26th, 2012 12:27 PM║ Posted By: John Pennington ║ Permalink ║ Tags: Ole Miss
The Ole Miss basketball team hosts Florida tonight in the first of three Thursday-Saturday turnarounds in the next month. But if you want Andy Kennedy to get onboard the Complain Train, you’re out of luck:
“I don’t put a lot of thoguht in that because I don’t really have anything to do with. We all realize that we’re in a big business. SEC men’s basketball is a high-dollar business. And the reason that it is on a lot of fronts, is because of television revenue.
So television affords you the opportunity to get in those windows and those windows are Thursday and Saturday. If they choose you to fit those windows, then we’ll do the best we can to do just that.”
Kudos to Kennedy. Unlike other coaches who’ve chosen to gripe about the league’s schedule right in the middle of the season — when nothing can be done about it — the Rebels’ coach is biting his tongue.
You can be sure that Kennedy isn’t pleased that his team got the worst of the Thursday-Saturday turnarounds. And if he’s still around for this year’s SEC Meetings in Destin, we hope he voices any complaints he might have before the next batch of schedules is put together.
But for now, Mississippi’s coach is refusing to create negative press for the league office and he’s not teaching his players that it’s not okay to make excuses. Good for him.
The other issue to consider here is ability to draw a television audience. In SEC football, the stronger teams get more favorable time slots while the weaker teams get lunch time starts as a general rule because they are less desirable match-ups for the networks. If the SEC wanted to be totally fair then even the Kentucky's and Vanderbilt's ought to get their share of CBS national prime time games at least as many as Bama and LSU. Not gonna happen. The fans of weaker SEC teams will forever be having breakfast and going to the game. The same is true for Basketball. The stronger teams with national followings are the ones the networks build their schedules around. If the weaker SEC basketball programs build a stronger program with the ability to draw ratings points and you'll get better scheduling. In the meantime...stop complaining and get to building your program.
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