@JayHawkFanToo
I was just thinking of viewing audience market share, rather than institutional power. Roman Catholicism has a solid market share of the Bo-Wash Corridor cities and burbs plus south Florida. In other words they are a major market share in the dominant time zone--EST--Americans of Italian, Irish, Polish, Puerto Rican, Cuban descent. And Catholics in the French part of Louisiana and the hispanics in Tayhoss give Catholicism a good CSt foot print to. What other relatively allied audience group can give you that much core audience? And folks always underestimate how many good Catholics are African Americans. All totalled, that Catholic TV market will hunt. Hold them and that's maybe better than pulling strong with the Balkanized Protestants and Fundies from Virginia down through the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida. Hillary got enough of these Catholic folks to win the popular vote by several millions. She was stupid in a lot of ways, but not in picking Tim Kaine. Trump wasn't sucking up to Christy and Giuliani just for mob support. He could not let all the Catholic votes go to Kaine and still win. He had to have some to to go along with his Pence fundies and alt righters, and conservative Protestants. You can't go wrong appealing to Catholicism, so long as doing so doesn't cost you something else crucial. All audiences have to be assembled today, because the nation has been sliced and diced and fragmented from 35 years of divide and conquer politics and the creation of 2000 channels and the internet. You build an audience by finding a core group and then adding pieces. Both Clinton AND Trump had to do the same thing: identity politics. They were just appealing to differing identies. So does CBS and the NCAA for March. If they don't build an audience piece by piece during the season, the audience is too fragmented to survive the negative effects of early round losing to build to a big event. Package a Catholic team to appeal to a large core in the EST and brand it as you go; then as the Carney operators said, "We have a winnuh!"
If you could be sure Nova would win, then you could afford to brand them and even to let KU play in the Finals. "We have a winnuh!"
This isn't exactly new news. Catholics have long been a way to market in sports and politics. But they are hardly the only way. There are different ways to build an audience, same as skinning cats.
There's tournament engineering and audience engineering. Heck, there's probably quite a lot of memetic engineering going in both, as well as in sport and politics more broadly.
The nerds didn't take over. The engineers did. It's just that nerds were a sizable share of engineers. My new mantra is: EVERYTHING THAT CAN BE ENGINEERED WILL BE ENGINEERED. But I digress.
Back to Catholic influence in the bidness of sport.
Note that gaming is much more complex than one casino in Vegas with an influential betting line. In the EST the Irish and Italian cultures reputedly like to bet and Irish and Italian organizations reputedly handle a goodly share of the action. So in the EST, gaming has a very Catholic connection. Not an insidious one. Just a cultural connection.
But since you asked about the "power" of Roman Catholicism, let me answer that query this way. First, I'm a fan of Roman Catholicism, same as most religions, even though I'm a Protestant. So I'm not picking on them. I have no trouble talking about the religio-cultural tendencies of Catholics, Episcopalians, Jews, Muslims, Shinto Buddhists, Hindus, aetheists, etc. Since the Vatican accepted Temporal powers from Charlemagne, it grew into one of the largest economic entities on the planet by the Middle Ages. They have operated directly, or indirectly, seemingly forever the oldest central bank--The Bank of Italy, and since 1209 the oldest continuously operating stock market in the world in Bologna. They probably own more gold located just on the ceilings of their cathedrals than most of the nation states of the world own in their vaults, to say nothing of the Vatican's reputedly sizable bullion holdings and investment portfolios. The Vatican has partnered in business for some periods with most of the great empires of the West since the first millennium. The Vatican, whatever else it is, is a bidness--a corporate bidness. It kind of wrote the conceptual book on incorporation. The Vatican allied with the Habsburg silver and gold fortune in the 1400-1600s to mobilize its own Christendom, stymied by Eurasian obstructionism, to find a sea route to China and to colonize and then mint gold in South America as the world's first reserve currency for trade with China. They started the modern university and own and operate lots of them around the world. They own probably the largest private hospital chain in the USA. And so on. They are huge by any measure of wealth, revenue and market share. There are about 1.2 Billion Roman Catholics in the world; that puts them in a league with China, but smaller than the Crown of Great Britain's 2.2 Billion subjects. The Crown is the biggest dog on the block. Period. And let's not get into the Vatican's more recent political alliances. Suffice it to say that gold, investing, and the time value of money have been and continue to be good to the Vatican. And today they appear influential enough in USA to populate half the Supreme Court justices with only 28% of the USA population. The Vatican and the Crown of Great Britain modeled as a business entitity off the Vatican, are arguably the two richest and most influential essentially private transnational economic entities on the planet. So: yes, the Vatican is quite powerful as an economic entity with that big 1.2 Billion population of tithers to boot. Heck, the rate of growth in Christian's, mosthly Roman Catholics, in China grows about 7% per year and totalled 10 million in 1980 and now 100 million in 2015! Heck yes Roman Catholicism is economically powerful. It isn't a political power, per se, so much as a giant multinational corporation with its own central bank. The Rockefellers, Morgans, Mellons, Schiffs, and Warburgs have theirs too. And the Rothschilds largely control them and the Crown of GB, so it's not like they are absolutely top of the heap, but they're making ends meet okay. And they tend to hang in longer than families. And getting richer all the time. Not in a way to be feared IMHO, unless you fear the Crown of Great Britain, and the owners of the Fed, but rather just the way it is. Check this interesting link out for Catholicism in China.
http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/why-is-christianity-growing-so-quickly-in-mainland-china-57545/ ↗
Hope this helps clarify what I was getting at.
