Clay Travis lays out trip to Aggieland, future of SEC

Notes from Clay Travis interview

* For those out there that aren’t familiar, Clay Travis is the owner and operator of OutkickTheCoverage.com. He has been covering college football for quite some time and released his book Dixieland Delight in 2007 detailing his travel to all, at that time, 12 SEC schools in the same season. He was very fortunate to launch his website just before SEC expansion talks began and was able to gain much publicity to get his site off the ground through that. His goal with the website is to be entertaining and fun, which he believes has been accomplished so far.

* He loved his trip to College Station for the LSU game. In his writing, he tries not to be an X’s and O’s guy, but rather someone who catches the uniqueness of the SEC and the festivities surrounding it. Earlier this year, he went to Missouri for their game against Georgia and had a great time there as well. He loves the state of Texas and has for a long time, even before talks of A&M to the SEC fired up. He is convinced that A&M is going to be very successful in the SEC and thinks that the university has been very smart about gluing their brand to that of the SEC.

* While covering SEC expansion, it took a lot of telephone conversations to stay on top of the day-to-day news as it came available. He was obsessed with realignment and thinks that it really played to his strengths due to his legal background. He loves to cover the more complicated issues with more moving parts because it allows him to get really involved in the stories. Being told that he covered realignment better than ESPN or CBS by SEC officials is the best compliment he has received and let him know that his work was definitely being recognized.

* Kyle Field ranks very high on the list of overall stadium atmospheres in the SEC. ESPN messed up everyone’s plans by putting the LSU game at 11 in the morning, and the network is furious at him for calling them out for doing so. One of the top executives of ESPN was quoted as saying he was, “napalming the network”, but usually when you make someone that mad it’s because you’re telling the truth. He will do rankings of stadium atmospheres at the end of the year, but Kyle Field is definitely towards the top of the list.

* People ask him who A&M reminds him of, and his answer is always Auburn. When you talk about Auburn you have to think about driving in the middle of nowhere and then all of a sudden stumbling upon a place of nearly 100,000 people that are wild and crazy about Auburn football. Auburn and College Station are towns that seem to solely exist for Auburn and A&M football, and that gives them a specific aura unlike anywhere else. He recently called Kevin Sumlin, Johnny Manziel and A&M’s move to the SEC as the holy trinity of Aggie athletics all coming together at the same time to give A&M football a new birth so to speak.

* He thinks the SEC Network will happen by the start of the 2014 football season. The SEC Network will be the anti-Longhorn Network in the sense that people will want to watch it and will carry a lot of content that people will love. The SEC Network is going to be incredibly lucrative, and potentially could be the most lucrative regional sports network in the country. One of the reasons the Longhorn Network has not succeeded is because it has horrible programming that keeps people from thinking that having the channel is a necessity. The SEC Network will have between 40 and 50 football games in its first year of existence which is one major reason why it should have much more success than the Longhorn Network.

* Since most people in the SEC states are fans of the whole conference and not necessarily just one team, cable providers in all of those states are going to be forced to carry the SEC Network because of the demand to watch league-wide games. Each person pays about $5.00 of their cable bill specifically to get ESPN, which is the highest price of any specific channel. The largest regional sports networks in the country are in the $3.00 range right now, but the SEC network is expected to top that and bring around a billion dollars a year of television money being distributed between the 14 SEC schools. The possibility of the SEC Network definitely played into realignment and snagging the Texas and Missouri markets was a smart move by the conference.