Hurtlocker

...I really don’t know how the media marketers measure the financial standing of different programs’ viewers/fans. I suspect this factor explains why the B1G media payout is better than the SEC’s. That is an interesting and odd graph, quite a few teams have over a third of their total weeks in the top five, including UCF. Clearly some of these teams benefit just from caring about football for longer or longer ago than others. But I think it is pathway kind of thing: Win games Sell more seats invest in more seats See #1 To your point, the teams who won the most over time should have the biggest stadiums that are filled to capacity. And I still think that paid attendance, at the school level, is a great indicator of fan support. Total stadium size kind of caps your total market size and percent of capacity shows how well you're capturing your market. In the above, you have UCLA, kind of right in the middle of the "Look at how awesome I am" in the AP results, playing in a stadium that is clearly not on campus and too big for their needs, only filling around 40k or around 40% of the Rose Bowl, in any given year. To either wise is Tennessee and Clemson, whose stadiums are always rocking. From a what can we learn, I'd say the ones with low capacity and losing (e.g. empty stadiums and bad records), kind of makes sense, likely will bounce back. Hopefully...maybe....they better. The ones losing and have high capacity, look out, they're going to be on fire if they start winning. Everyone else you're kind of where you expect to be. Win for long enough while being at capacity and you can either raise prices or increase seating. Once you reach a certain threshold between 80-100k your prices just tend to go up as your seating market caps. All this being said, secondary market ticket prices are BS for the most part and are typically a dumb way to judge interest. Not only does it not benefit the school, but it could fluctuate with weather or time of year or how well the season played out. In the example above, single game secondary market jumps rarely occur because the host school cares more, but because the host school fans realize they can cash in on the visiting fans. Supply, meet demand. If a fan can pay for a third of their season in one game, because someone is going to overspend for it, why not sell? Everyone has a price. It doesn't mean interest in that game, overall, is higher, it just means there is more interest in cashing out of that game. Especially if it is easier to see a game in that town. When talking about realignment though, it is nearly all, to the second point, about broadcast viewership and marketing to those demographics, namely 18-34 males. And most of that is viewership over time, they don't care about attendance they're marketing to who is watching. The B1G is top draw with some pretty solid demographics, and they are top draw in the biggest DMAs. They also get a bonus if the company owns the local TV stations in the markets around the games, e.g. Chicago, LA, NYC, Philly, DC. Indiana and Northwestern are as craptastic as Mississippi State and Vandy, but Michigan/Ohio State in the regular season out drew the SEC championship game and every other game last year except Michigan's games against Washington and Alabama. That's how the B1G tops the SEC. Their brands are bigger in bigger markets and their media contract allows them to high light them in different broadcasters in different windows all day so they have three companies marketing them non-stop. Its smart, and its going to be annoying to have to listen to.

The JMU/AppState games are real fun ones and up in little stadiums in the mountains with rabid fans. “And we don’t like issues.”

Not sure where the right place to put this stuff for future CFB is that I used to dump in realignment

If collective bargaining happens, caps isn't likely far behind.

ESPN has a lot more of the B12's games now, so I'd expect you'd see them swapping with the ACC on Thurs/Fri nights there and then taking over the after dark slot on Saturday. Fox will mostly be about 4-6 Big Fox saturday games a year and probably a weekly FS1. Everything else on Fox will be Big Ten.

I think the two richest Cyclone wrestlers coach Iowa and Penn State

That actually sounds like a good Dev league option for Spring Football and Summer Basketball.

Yeah Title IX has two solutions, it's not insurmountable: Sponsor all sporting opportunities Sponsor equal sporting opportunities Sponsoring all doesn't necessarily mean it has to be even. If you sponsor all womens and all mens sports, you're considered giving equal representation. This is what most Pac schools did, hence why they ran in the red. If you can't sponsor all, then you have to have the same number and since football has so many, men's sports get cut and womens sports get added. The money being discussed doesn't really change this dynamic. Either you choose to fund all sports or you don't. NIL doesn't fund sports. NIL isn't even. NIL is overused at this point and has gravitated away from actually being NIL, but at some point will need to get back to NIL, since that's what started this all. NIL in the universities just means it will not be in outside collectives, it will be in university housed agencies that report and file and audit. However, as long as sports are tied to universities, you can't shed Title IX. Ohio State and Texas make far more off research grants than they do off athletics. So this concept of football breaking away won't happen, unless it breaks away with an equal amount of something female. A far more likely break away is that the College Football Playoff breaks away with the top 48-64 schools and forms its own rules, regulations, shared media contracts, lobbying and, since they will have all the money, enforcement. The NCAA will then handle everyone left. At first I didn't think this had very good odds, but now that the NCAA tried to stick most of the settlement on the schools with the least amount of money, I'd be shocked if this didn't end up being how it settles out, where the vast majority of schools eject to clubs and leave the P4 with the check.

Title IX occurs at the University level of federal funding, regardless of the amount of money the athletic department makes. If the university takes federal research grants, you have to follow Title IX regulations.

This seems to be the biggest part of this to me:

You can get close to the NFL model, which has 32 teams, but not exactly, just due to how both are set up. NFL teams are condensed in major markets, this allows them to segregate their broadcasts so each major DMA has the local game to maximize eyeballs across the nation in two windows, with national games making up the remaining three. College sports are more partitioned than this and less attuned to a DMA than an NFL team, so you can't do this same strategy. They used to mirror more, but they don't get NFL numbers, even if you had USC in the west, Texas in the Central, and Georgia on the East at the same time, you wouldn't draw NFL numbers. For the CFB you need brands and brands only draw when they're winning. Too few teams in whatever you call the league (Super, Power, whatever) and the big brands collect too many losses for high viewership interest. Too many teams and the big brands don't meet enough to maximize revenues. If, to keep the math simple from above, we agree you have 16 major brands in CFB (though I'd argue it is closer to 6), you want them to meet around 2-3 times per regular season, which is 32-48 games a year. With three windows a Saturday, that nets you 2.5ish games a week, depending on other sporting events clogging up windows. For those games to generate a lot of eyeballs, like half of the NFL eyeballs, you need the teams to be playing for the division lead or something. Right now the big brands are paying the generals the same amount as the globetrotters, which isn't sustainable either. Step one is they have to finally shed conferences. Until whatever the end result becomes actually pools their full media rights, like they do for the playoffs, they're leaving massive amounts of money on the table. Should that occur, what do they make of it? Now you have 34 in the P2, but they're all paid the same. At some point to make the next growth jump, the brands will need to siphon off of that too, hence the payment tiering they've already started. So do you keep 34, or move to 40(4x10), or 48 (4x12 or 6x8) or 64 (8x8)? The sweet spot is probably between 48-64 for maximizing both wins and marquee match ups per week and giving you less of a drastic upflow of money than at 34. Most money: Likely going to 40 with ND, FSU, Clemson, Miami, UNC, and someone else. Least Problems: Likely going to 64. Whatever this becomes is going to generate an astronomical number of lawsuits, the more sharing it the better. The more states with a player in the game, the better. The NFL also has an antitrust exemption CFB doesn't possess. Before they make this change, they'll need to work out all those player issues that are all wild, wild west now (that's two wilds, one west) and they're going to need to give up something, or a lot of somethings, to get help there.

Reading that article, 24 may be too many, looks more like 3x20, which if I'm doing my math right, is 10, not 22. If you use those viewer numbers above and assume basketball plays a tiebreaking part if you're a blueblood: Clearly in: ND, FSU, Miami, Clemson, UNC, Virginia, Duke Knife Fight for the Final Three: Stanford, Louisville, VTech, Pitt, NCSt, Cal, Cuse That being said, 64 has been the sweet spot for break away in our discussions for years. At 14, that would be the list above. I think @Al_4_ISU is onto something though and this "Super League" concept will likely set it off. PE won't stop trying to build it, just because they couldn't do it this time. CFB is leaving a lot of money on the table with fiefdoms, but the SEC and B1G don't want to share money. However, they put it in with this 6 year window, performance pays. If you move to the super league and get rid of the archaic concept of conferences (much like the archaic concept of bowl games was eventually destroyed) you can also start to weed out the schools that still get the free ride, e.g. Vandy, Northwestern, Rutgers, etc. They don't need to be demoted, but you can just pay on tiers on this six-year swing. Share 50% of the cash, divide the rest like: Top 16 - 40% Second 16 - 30% Third - 20% Fourth - 10% If you had a $6.5b contract (regular and post 6 years from now), you'll lose a percent to the PE, so let's give them $500m yearly, leaving you $6b to share (rounding so may not be exact). Top 16 - $54.7m (50%) + $87.5m (40%) = $142.2m Second 16 - $54.7m + $65.6m (30%) = $120.3m Third - $54.7m + $43.8m (20%) = $98.5m Fourth - $54.7m + 21.9m (10%) = $76.6m Now you have relegation without having to have multiple leagues, you make more over all with pooled contracts, you give the opportunity to make more with performance, the top brands will make far more than currently, and you can budget due to a six-year cycle. The schools that underperform and piss Al off for getting paid due to starting life on third base drift to wherever they actually should be. If I'm the PE, I start talking to Michigan/Texas/Ohio State/USC/Bama/Georgia/NDs of the world, that's where this will get decided. And, if I'm the PE, I immediately do the same thing with the "Group of Five" with a much smaller number and structure the games to play off days from the top, filling broadcast windows.

Yeah this is the next end game. It won't be the top 18 brands on their own, or relegation, but the top 60 some schools will break out to become the next version of the NCAA, for football at least, under the CFP money umbrella. My guess is the first step is sharing the same set of rules for the sport, players, NIL, etc, but the holy grail will be moving to a full NFL model of media contracts, where all of the schools involved pool broadcast inventory together for the regular season and playoffs. If you think the jump the B1G did in how they structured their last deal was large, leveraging them all together would create a juggernaut that would likely increase media valuations 5-10x over todays. But before you get there, you need to show you can operate together as a cohesive unit.

Eh, no. Leaving early, contractually with the media partners, actually had to be settled out by giving Fox more. The Big 12 teams did not get a premium for six years to allow a one-year early exit, that's crazy talk. If there was movement the Big12 would have been looking at a $60m average over 6-8 years, due to how their T1 contract was severely undervalued from being so old, now they're looking at a $40m over 6, that's a sizable decrease with the big brand exits. Additionally, they likely got 10-15% less for signing fast. However, after watching what happened to the Pac, resigning at stable rates was the exact right decision. I don't think anyone in whatever the new 16 is going to be called, is going to be complaining about media revenues. The only increase that occurred here that isn't market dependent is the boosts they gave to the schools coming in, but that was completely paid for by Texas and OU's buy out fees. They basically invested it to lure in more schools, like Colorado and Arizona.

Not sure on 2011, I thought it was closer to 2016. That's when there was a lot of Clemson/FSU to the Big12 talk and they got all hoity saying the ACC schools were a better academic fit or something. What they wanted was the ACC Network because the SEC was getting a network and making more money. However, building that network cost them 20 years. I think they thought the ACC Network was the golden goose and it would pay out $20+ million a team or something, but, spoiler, it didn't.

End of an era

On the FSU front, from the Tampa Bay Times: We ran an FSU football playoff conspiracy theory by a sports businessman You don’t have to look hard to find conspiracy theories about why 13-0 Florida State was left out of the College Football Playoff in favor of 12-1 Alabama. The playoff selection committee’s stated reason, of course, was that the Seminoles were a different team without star quarterback Jordan Travis. FSU’s weaker schedule didn’t help. Message boards and social media have other ideas — namely that ESPN was pulling the strings on the selection committee. The playoff’s broadcaster either wanted to protect another partner (the SEC) by picking the Crimson Tide or wanted Alabama to boost TV ratings. There’s no evidence to support the arguments, unless you think the order of helmets behind analyst Kirk Herbstreit was a sign. ESPN partners with the ACC, too, and committee chairperson Boo Corrigan is the athletic director at an ACC school (North Carolina State) that would have made more money with FSU, not Alabama, in the field. Regardless, we ran the root of the theory by Ray Katz. He’s the chief operating officer of the media rights and business firm Collegiate Sports Management Group and teaches at Columbia University’s sports management program. Would Alabama be a larger draw for casual fans in a way that FSU wouldn’t be? “I’m not going to say Florida State would not be,” Katz said. “I think it’s an incredibly compelling story.” FSU would have added a different name-brand program to the field. Alabama has only missed the playoff twice in 10 years; FSU has qualified for the semifinals once (2014). The Seminoles overcame Travis’ injury to win the ACC as Mike Norvell’s four-year rebuilding process culminated with a perfect season. It’s easy to envision that story attracting viewers. But the data on Alabama’s dominance is overwhelming. The Crimson Tide averaged 7.3 million viewers over the 11 games tracked by Sports Media Watch. The dozen FSU games with available data averaged 4.2 million viewers. “Every week that Alabama is on any kind of reasonable TV platform, they kick butt,” Katz said. “That’s just the reality of the situation… “I think it’s a Nick Saban effect to some extent. He stirs up the pot. You either tune in to watch him win, or you tune in to watch him lose. That’s just a fact.” That fact has attracted the interest of politicians. State Sen. Corey Simon, the former FSU star defensive lineman, wrote on social media after last week’s decision that ESPN has a “vested interest in the SEC participating in the CFP.” U.S. Sen. Rick Scott has asked to see any correspondence between committee members and ESPN and/or the SEC. Gov. Ron DeSantis has set aside $1 million in his proposed budget for possible litigation. Katz said he has a “real problem with all these popularity contests and prognostications.” How big of an underdog FSU would be in the playoff shouldn’t be a factor. But if Katz had to buy into an alternative explanation, his wouldn’t involve TV ratings. “My conspiracy theory is — if there was a conspiracy theory — it’s about them defending why they are going to 12 teams,” Katz said. When the field expands from four teams to 12 next year, teams that play in the first round and keep winning will play two more games than they would now. The longer season adds more wear and tear on players’ bodies and will cut into students’ class or free time, depending on the schedules. Katz said an exclusion like undefeated FSU provides a reason to justify expansion; the Seminoles would have made a 12-team field. “It defends that,” Katz said.

Late to the party on this NIL change of stance by the NCAA, but it is a major game changer. Not so much in that kids can get paid, but it is the line in the sand of our next division in college sports. They're trying to say it won't be, but there is no way you can have one set of schools openly paying players and another not yet consider them competitive. As soon as this gets voted on, it will be the FCS, the FBS, and the CFP. This CFP then can start implementing its own rules and regulations, require things that the NCAA cannot to everyone, including mandating participation to investigation and enforcement. (Currently the NCAA receives none of the money from football, but has to handle all of the investigation, with no one being required to participate. Expect that to change.) Some schools can make this change without batting a financial eye, some will do it to stay in the limelight. Many will say "fuck that". It is the beginning of the end for the current FBS structure. I've seen it estimated that for a school to comfortably adopt the new measures, they'd need to have an athletic department that has revenues of over $100m. As of the last reporting cycle, that includes 49 public programs, with Ohio State at the top and KState at 49 (likely more with privates like ND, USC, Miami, TCU, Baylor, NW and Vandy. All of the schools in that 49 are Power 5: $200M+: Ohio State, Texas, Bama, Michigan, Georgia $150m - $199M: LSU, A&M, Florida, Penn State, Oklahoma, Auburn, Michigan State, Indiana, Virginia (usually around $110m, had a huge donation), FSU, Kentucky, Clemson, Tennessee, Oregon, Arkansas, Iowa, Wisconsin $125m - $149M: Louisville, Illinois, Washington, Nebraska, South Carolina, Missouri, Minnesota, Ole Miss $100m - $124m: Arizona, UNC, ASU, Cal, Kansas, Utah, Purdue, VTech, ISU, MSU, TTech, Rutgers, Maryland, GTech, WVU, OkSt, UCLA, NCState, KState P5 Close, but not quite: Colorado ($94), UCF($89), WSU ($85), Oregon State ($83), Cinci ($83), Houston ($78) WSU/Beavers will see a reduction in revenue in 2-3 years, hard to see where they can keep up the drive. Colorado hasn't shown the Prime bump in these numbers, would expect them to be well over $100m by next report. UCF/Cinci/Houston/BYU are all getting $10m bumps even before they reach full payment in the Big12. With the privates, that puts about 70 teams in the NIL/CFB universe, most of whom already push NIL. But now they'll be able to set their own rules away from everyone else and that's huge.

This is great man, I'd love to see it again in a year. My suspicion what we see now is a bit of overvaluation on the conferences we see acquiring teams and we'll see a decrease in valuation somewhere to even it out. For instance, Texas leading the SEC is off a rank derived from being Bama, yes, but also Big 12 schools. If we assume the same projected power, and why wouldn't we, that decrease will not be felt in the B12 anymore, but instead against A&M, Arkansas, Mississippi State, Florida, and Kentucky, who will now own those losses. Same holds true for Oregon. They're going to get their wins, but now they have to beat Michigan, Ohio State and Washington next year to replicate those results. If they win out, either Michigan or Ohio State will have two losses at the end of the year, diminishing their score. If the SEC/B1G were pushing only for the post season, they'd make sure their big brands only play one big brand a year, increasing the amount of 1 loss powers, but TV execs won't allow that to happen. Fox will easily screw ESPN on the post season to increase the value of their in-season schedule. The same was shown in the B12 this year. Cinci, Houston, BYU, and UCF likely had much higher scores last year, especially Cinci, but then met the meat grinder of P5 scheduling. You simply cannot have someone go up, without something else going down. Next year for the B12 they'll have someone make the next jump, because there will be 16 less losses in conference play with Texas/BlowU moving out. I agree fully with you that I expect Arizona and Utah to immediately step into top quad contenders, but the list of who could make it there with them includes KState, ISU, OkSt, WVU, Kansas, TCU, Colorado. They'll either suffer from the Pac 12 issue of no one ever getting through unscathed, or a couple are going to end up looking like power houses. To your point, no historical champs, but I think their ceiling looks higher than the ACC's with historic champs. I've been saying it for a year, and @bullet sort of just proved it. In the new 12 post season, I expect to see 3.5 teams a year each between the B1G/SEC (absorbing the Pac's old spot), 2/each for the B12/ACC, and one school from the PacMWC/SunBelt/AAC (likely in that order) each year with ND stealing one of the ACC's spots when good, since they can't ever receive a bye. I also expect to see the B12/ACC get more wins than most expect in that first round, which will give a huge bonus to whatever school can do it consistently. Semi's in, I expect historic power to dominate.

I'm guessing this is the score by half.

I want to see Georgia win and FSU get bounced to open up #4, but part of me wants the upset just to watch the world burn. Come on committee, explain to me how head to head works. Fucktards. Also, while the point is true, that dudes numbers were so off it is stunning - same point though. SEC - $330 B12 - $90 (actual seat, not SRO) B1G - $37 ACC - $30 PAC - $17 Also, story time because there is whiskey in me. Went with some guys on a weekend to the cocktail party. Played Sawgrass on Friday, woke up blind drunk on Saturday and proceeded to make our way to the game to scalp tickets. The Florida side had me wondering, even in my obliterated state, if I had all my shots. On the Georgia side it was a freakish orchestra of black leather pants and mini skirts with skin tight red sweaters, like it was a school uniform. At some point a guy in our group had his moment where he bought a nerf football from an 8 year old for like $100. As we looked at him as perplexed as monkeys punching a monolith as he proceeded to just chuck it randomly into the Georgia tailgating crowd. As we innocently followed that crazy misplaced football around for hours we ran into an ungodly high number of hot girls who had no right being at this game, dressed in that uniform. I recommend.

https://x.com/RedditCFB/status/1730810645514244432?s=20

Yes!