(06-30-2018 11:52 AM)Strut Wrote: (06-30-2018 07:50 AM)GE and MTS Wrote: Kansas is looking less like an option to expand with. The same can be said about the regular ACC crew.
My hunch is that football is over the shark (pro and college), and if you look at the landscape of college sports with more emphasis on everything other than football I think KU and ACC schools project upward with as much or more potential as anyone. IMO the schools that rely most heavily on football will be most negatively impacted as current trends play out
That's not to suggest football will go away, I refer to baseball, boxing, FM and even AM radio, as while far from their heyday still have varying degrees of relevance. Their successors just move the needle a whole lot more than they do currently or maybe ever did.
What are you suggesting? A PS4 team? No non revenue sports will ever drive realignment because the nature of the beast is making more money! If football wanes in popularity the revenue simply goes down. Basketball revenue is already in decline outside of the NBA. That may be partly remedied by leaving the NCAA who pockets over 70 million a year from the tournament while making disbursements in arrears so they can earn even more on the principal. To date their endowment has exceeded 1 Billion and all of it came from the NCAA tournament. So quite frankly the analysis I would make is that Kansas, and the ACC basketball first schools would only drag down the Big 10's current revenue for hoops. Your hoops regular season means so much within the Big 10 footprint that adding new faces and playing those traditional games less often would only hurt.
Under the subscription fee pay models Virginia, Notre Dame, and North Carolina would have added tremendously to the Big 10 payouts. Notre Dame simply because having them gives whichever network holds Big 10 rights exclusivity for advertising in Cincinnati, Detroit, Chicago, New York City, Indianapolis and cities on the East Coast and in New England it would give you a deeper penetration. Right now advertisers can use N.D. to penetrate too many Big 10 cities without having to pay the Big 10 to do it.
Without the market model N.D. is the only one of those three schools that moves the content model for football which remains 80% of all sports revenue generated by colleges and universities.
Why is there so much rancor between PAC / SEC and Big 10 folks over Texas and Oklahoma? They are can't miss financially on every pay model. Between the two they deliver a market addition of 32 million. From a content perspective they are both 2 national brands with history. From a WSJ valuation of economic impact they bring to their respective regions they are 2 of the only 3 schools with an impact of over 1 billion dollars with Ohio State being the 1st and Alabama being 4th just a smidgen under 1 billion. And both would improve the attendance mean of any of those 3 conferences.
Making the competition perhaps even more heated is the fact that they may be the only two schools that would add to the overall value of the Big 10 at 50.1 million in payouts and the SEC at 45-46 million in payouts projected for next year. Florida State is barely on the cusp of profitability for the SEC and may be on the cusp for the Big 10. And the pairing of OU and UT is the only potential salvation for revitalizing PAC revenues. There aren't any other prospects for them that move the needle in spite of the oodles of posts to the contrary by fans on message boards everywhere.
I'm not even sure at this point that the SEC could afford to take North Carolina, Duke, or Virginia since all they add to is the academic standing of the conference but would come at a significant cost the SEC's bottom line athletically.
I think the ideal additions to the Big 10 boil down to this:
Texas & Oklahoma
Texas & Notre Dame
Oklahoma & Notre Dame
and all other pairings that have 1 of those three being accompanied by a Kansas, Virginia, or North Carolina are slightly better than break even.
For the SEC the ideal additions would be similar:
Texas & Oklahoma
Oklahoma & Florida State
Texas & Florida State
And all other pairings that have 1 of those three being accompanied by Clemson, North Carolina, or Virginia Tech are slightly better than break even.
For defensive reasons the SEC might well consider the pairings of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State or Texas and Texas Tech since either of them would keep us either slightly ahead of future Big 10 payouts or close enough that TV revenue would not be a determining factor going forward.
So it is not likely that either of us move past 16 and the only scenario I could see that would move to the Big 10 to 18 and the SEC to 18 would be these:
Big 10:
Duke, North Carolina, Virginia, and Notre Dame
Kansas, Iowa State, Texas, Oklahoma
SEC:
Clemson, Florida State, Virginia Tech, North Carolina or N.C. State
Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas, Texas Tech.
And only then would either of us move to 18 if taking the group was a requirement from those looking to move.
Clearly both of us make money at 16 with the choices I've listed and clearly both of us would be seeking to control a market at less than ideal revenue by going to 18.
