Sunday, March 1, 2015

Crawford's Sports Biz and Golf Combo, For March 1st, 2015

By Gregory Crawford--- COO of Kiyokawa Crawford Sports Management--- on twitter @kcsportsmgt @wchoops @crawssportsbiz

Note: Today starts a new chapter for this blog, hopefully one you will see for long time. As great readers, you keep asking me for even more sports business news and more golf. So starting today and produced everyday but Thursday, it will be Crawford's Sports Biz and Golf Combo. Lots of sports business, golf and even a few comments about sports in the media. We will also continue with Crawford's Sports Biz 59 Seconds each day, in a separate post. Thank you readers for pushing this forward and contacting me on what you want to see.

Jack Nicklaus--- Jack Nicklaus likes ice cream, so much he now has his own brand, which will be in selected stores across the country this month. Nicklaus has teamed up with the Schwan Company, to produce the big treat. The suggested retail price for the pint of ice cream will be a $1.99 and in typical Nicklaus fashion part of the proceeds will go to charity.

Rob Manfred---- The new commissioner of baseball is obviously off to a fast start. He wants to speed up the game, with less time between innings and less ways for players to delay the game, when it is going on.

The average major league game last year took 3 hours 2 minutes, which with today's demand for speed in everything we do, does not settle well with most people and sports fans.

Manfred is also speaking out frequently about the fact baseball needs to become a bigger business. At present it is a $9 billion per year business, Manfred wants to move that figure to $15 billion in the next few years. Is it possible, you make the call.

Boxing On TV---- It is has been many years since we have seen prime time boxing on free TV, well I guess TV really is not free these days in most cases----- but boxing in prime time is about to change.

Starting this Saturday night, NBC Sports will show boxing in prime time, starting at 8:30 EST and 5:30 on the west coast. They have lined up a "heavyweight" team of announcers for the show with Al Michaels, Marv Albert, Laila Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard.

I think this will be a huge success, but you make the call.

NBC Golf--- Speaking of NBC, golf has returned to NBC this past week, with the Honda Classic and the annual Florida swing on the PGA Tour, of which NBC has traditionally televised.

No one does golf bad, but NBC is leader in golf coverage, both with its announce team and production. It will be real interesting to see how Fox Sports does with golf coverage, starting this year, as the network of record for all USGA TV events. They will open up with the U.S. Open at Chambers Bay, a tough place to televise for any network. Even more important, how much will the USGA allow lead analyst Greg Norman, who will team with Jack Buck, to really tell us what he thinks. Norman to his credit can be pretty blunt, I hope he does not get boxed in too much.

Rivals.com---- Rivals.com, is expanding, amongst some controversy. The website who does a great job of tracking high school football players and recruiting of those players, has now gotten involved in telling us about middle school football players, very few I might add, but enough to get people thinking about how young is young.

Daryl Morey----Morey is not only the general manager of the Houston Rockets, but he is also is the founder of the MIT Sloan Sports Analytic Conference, which was just completed.

Morey feels the next big frontier for sports analytics will be in soccer, now that it is used heavily in baseball and basketball.

Yes, we all know, that Morey checks with Charles Barkley on all of this, since Barkley has taken a few jabs at Morey and thinks analytics is a big joke.

You make the call, but for sure analytics in sports is not going away by any means and more teams are using them all the time, effectively or not.

email--- crawfordssportsbiz@gmail.com

more of Gregory blogs--- http://gregcrawfordbasketball.blogspot.com

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