Tag Archives: mountain-west-conference

Sports Marketing seminar not to be missed

May 4, 2015 @packers4 Leave a comment

A great initiative from the Southern Football Netball League in presenting a seminar that will provide tips to community clubs on sports marketing in the digital age.

Featuring Senior Associate Commissioner Dan Butterly and Sports Geek Sean Callanan, the seminar will be held on Wednesday 13 May 2015 starting at 6.30pm at Clayton Football Club rooms. Both Dan and Sean are former Sportzfan Radio contributors and have a long history in sports marketing.

Dan is responsible for branding and marketing the Mountain West Conference which forms part of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in the USA. He is the key person involved in marketing, promotions, merchandising, licensing and advertising. The Mountain West comprises 12 colleges in 8 states of the USA with almost 6,000 student athletes involved in 15 different sporting disciplines.

The Mountain West has been a very successful conference having, in the last 16 years, had one of their student athletes selected as the number one draft pick in the NFL, MLB and NBA drafts. That includes Australia’s own Andrew Bogut who was the first Australian drafted at number one into the NBA.

Sean Callanan or the Sports Geek, as he is better known in sports digital circles, is at the cutting edge in the field and his expertise has seen him develop a client base in both Australia and internationally. He
provides advice to teams in the NBA, AFL, NRL and cricket and is also a much sought after presenter at any seminar covering his area of expertise. He is fresh from presenting at the SEAT conference held in March 2015 in London.

This is sure to be an opportunity not to be missed to hear two leaders in their respective fields.

Check out the SFNL website for further details.

Podcast

Sportzfan Radio 7 August 2011 #213.1

August 8, 2011 @packers4 Leave a comment

7 August 2011 213.1 – Once again Daniel Eade is unable to join the Panel, this time through illness. The Panel start the show with a discussion on the Melbourne Football Club. Dan Butterly comes on to talk US sport highlighting the imminent start of the College football season. He thinks it is no surprise that Oklahoma is ranked number 1 in the polls. It could be a great year for people who are against the BCS system. Dan is surprised that the Air Force Academy and San Diego State are not in the top 25. He believes that if TCU were a member of one of the BCS conferences they would have been ranked higher. Dan says it is a perception thing. He thinks it is out of Luke Fickell (OSU), Mark Richt (Georgia) and Rick Neuheisel (UCLA) who will be the first College football coach sacked. Dan then looks at the NBA lockout. He thinks it is going to be a very long dispute and realistically they could lose the whole season with the owners playing hardball. Plenty of players have signed overseas agreements meaning they think it won’t be sorted out soon. The NFL has solved their problems and their lockout is over with the teams now in training camp. Dan says it will be interesting to see how the pre-season will go with only a few weeks to the first game. He finishes with a chat about injured Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez being investigated for participating in an underground poker tournament. The Gelding comes on to talk horse racing from Flemington and Randwick yesterday. The Gelding picked three winners and a placing. He also indicates Danish Rock is due for a jumpout at Caulfield on Tuesday.

Podcast

Sportzfan Radio #192.2

March 6, 2011 @packers4 Leave a comment

6 March 2011 192.2 – Mark Fiorenti talks with the Panel about the poor crowd attending the A League preliminary final. The Professor asks if marquee matches should be played in population centres to draw a crowd and says it is incumbant on the organising body to look at this. Mark then looks at the Asian Champions League matches involving Melbourne Victory and Sydney. He asks the Professor how frustrating it must be to be an Arsenal supporter. The Panel then talk with Australia’s first professional women’s world boxing champion Susie Ramadan. She recently won the world IBF bantamweight title. Susie says she is a “Girly, Girl” but wanted something mentally challenging that got her fit so took up boxing. She fought 79 amateur fights and 20 times as a pro winning all of them and eight by KO. With women’s boxing starting to gain acceptance, she believes it won’t be long before we see a TV show like the Contender about women boxers. The Panel come back and examine the Ricky Nixon saga and ask why he hasn’t been suspended pending the outcome of the AFLPA investigation. This leads to a greater examination of the role of the player agent. There is also a discussion of Bernie Ecclestone’s suggestion to use artificial rain to liven up Grand Prix racing. All agree the sport is in trouble if it needs to resort to tricks. John suggests that the doctrine of ‘volenti non fit injuria‘ applies…we liked that! There is a further discussion of the AFL, AFLPA and player agents. Sean Callanan, batting clean up again, talks about the Mountain West Conference rating their twitter followers with a new program called Sports Digital Passion. It ranks the ‘fandom’ of the MWC twitterers. It is not true that Charlie Sheen is a member of the MWC. Sean also talks about ‘Social Media Executioners’. He has also made a bit of progress on getting Aaron Rodgers on Sportzfan Radio talking with some Packers officials, clearly a work in progress.

News, Sports

Mountain West Conference rating twitter followers

March 6, 2011 @packers4 Leave a comment

To celebrate two years on twitter the Mountain West Conference has started ranking their fans on twitter….what a great idea! I have made the “first team”…now time to try and improve my ranking.

We’ll talk with our US reporter Dan Butterly about this when he is back on air after the MWC Basketball tournament and NCAA Basketball finals.

Meantime, why not see where you are rated as an MWC twitter fan!

packers4

Score: 1260

Ranking: 9

Level: 1st Team

Get your @SportsDP score for MWC here

News, Sports

Rose Bowl decides nothing

January 2, 2011 @packers4 Leave a comment

For the record let it be known that the TCU Horned Frogs (from the Mountain West Conference and ranked #3 in the NCAAF rankings) defeated the Wisconsin Badgers (from the Big 10 Conference and ranked #4) 21-19 to take out the prestigious Rose Bowl. Also for the record, TCU had a perfect season and finished with a 13-0 win loss record.

Only the vagaries of the NCAA/BCS (Bowl Championship Series) system could allow an undefeated team to not play for the #1 spot. Currently there are three undefeated teams in NCAAF play. Auburn, Oregon and TCU. Auburn and Oregon play off for number one spot on the 10 January 2011 in the ‘so called’ BCS Championship game.

My question to both the NCAA and the BCS is “How can the winner of that game possibly be crowned number one?”. If nothing else, at least the game will eliminate one of those teams from contention as one will suffer defeat and that will leave only two teams with perfect records. No amount of computer or human prediction will ever be able to tell us whether the TCU Horned Frogs could beat the other undefeated team.

Countless people, including President Obama have called for urgent change to the BCS system…and with good cause. The BCS is the equivalent of an exclusive club – in this case six BCS conferences who are guaranteed automatic berths to the big money Bowl games. These six BCS conferences are supposedly ‘stronger’ than the other conferences and therefore somehow have a greater entitlement. Let me say that in my years following NCAAF, that assessment can only possibly have been made on an historical basis. Clearly, that is not the case today.

Let’s for a moment take a look at the BCS Conference Wisconsin hails from – the Big 10. In Bowl games yesterday that Conference went 0-5 – a big duck egg!! If we now take the time to also review the Mountain West Conference, they are 4-1 in Bowl games this year, the fourth consecutive year they have sent five football teams to bowl games, posting the best win percentage among the eleven FBS conferences for the fourth time in seven years. The MWC will also claim the 2010-11 Bowl Challenge Cup, becoming the only Conference to win the trophy four times since the award’s inception in 2002-03.

So you tell me…on those figures alone, are the Big 10 stronger than the MWC? The answer is a resounding “No”! Do the Big 10 deserve preferred treatment over the MWC? The answer is also a resounding “No”!

As I see it there is only one solution to this impasse. Change the system! Bring in a playoff system between the top ten ranked teams. This could be done within the current Bowl calendar. It would also mean that many of those Bowl games would gain some relevance rather than be as they are now, a match between Colleges who managed to scrape together a .500 season. Hardly riveting, prime time viewing!

Fairness demands that parochial vested interests be set aside for a fairer system. Will it happen? Not unless the sporting public brings pressure to bear on the people controlling the system. Aside from the vested interests of the BCS conferences maintaining the status quo and hanging on to the big money Bowl games, perhaps more worrying to those Conferences is the spectre of being required to regularly compete against MWC colleges in the big games!

I am certainly looking forward to discussing this topic with our US correspondent, Dan Butterly, when Sportzfan Radio resumes on 16 January 2011. Our show won’t rest until the system is changed for the better!