(01-27-2013 01:35 PM)Attackcoog Wrote:  

(01-26-2013 07:39 PM)johnbragg Wrote:  

(01-26-2013 07:16 PM)ScreamShatter Wrote:  That's why expansion has mainly be driven by metro regions (households with TVs) as that is a standard TV marketing tool to evaluate advertisement pricing.

Not really--you're still selling the advertising based on projected audience, not just on potential audience. 25,000 households in Tulsa get about the same ad revenue as 25,000 households in New York, if somehow you had the same demographic/gender/income profile.

TV households are key when you're spreading a conference network to new areas. The reason that TV households have played a big role in non-SEC non-Big Ten realignment is that the cupboard is pretty bare. The teams will good attendance and big fanbases are already in power conferences. The ACC picked Pitt and Syracuse and Louisville, not Rutgers or Houston or Temple. The Big EAst's expansion choices were a lot less attractive.

So say you're choosing between 2 teams who each averaged 28,000 attendance in the BCS era, like San Diego State or Southern Miss. Let's just assume that their TV audiences are about the same. It makes sense to take San Diego State, who could easily improve on that number by not sucking. Southern Miss can't really argue that they're going to do better than that number.

(This sets aside cases like Boise State where their attendance doesn't match their TV fanbase.)

Basically, the thinking is all mid-majors are similar in that they are only interesting when they win. When they win, they can become major factors in that market. Thus a mid major in New York or Houston is more valuable than one in Las Crueces or Reno.

The strategy I see from a network point of view is this. Mid majors deliver their market when they win. Half of any league is going to be winners and half will be losers. Create a mid major league of all mid majors all in big metro areas--and you will be getting pretty good AQ type ratings every year in half of those big cities. With the new BCS rules, games with the top few teams will likely have some BCS implications--thus there could be some games with national implications. There is a strategy that actually makes sense underlying the nBE construction that will result in a better paycheck.

Agreed, just glad that for competitive reasons the Big East is probably going to make us the exception to the rule. Also, with an injection of 3 mil+, I can just about guarantee that we will up our performance another notch in the Big East.