(04-11-2014 02:33 PM)TexanMark Wrote: Until Notre Dame goes all in...I think a hybrid offer for UConn might be sound.
Pay them what ND is getting. Offer up 5-6 games a year Football. A rotating home/home.
Going to 16 in hoops has some advantages. Play a 18 game conference schedule in hoops. Put a time limit on the contract. They will be allowed to leave to another conference in 10 years if FB isn't invited.
This has been discussed before but it I think the timing is right.
I don't think that is a good idea, at all. Affiliate memberships are always a sore subject to the affiliate, particularly when the affiliate doesn't have all the benefits and integrations into the membership that it desires (see the Big East in the 90s with Rutgers, Temple, WVU, and Virginia Tech). Notre Dame is a very different situation in that it actually has full membership, with full voting privileges, subject to the same exit hurdles, and has no issue with any barriers into further conference integration.
Let me put it to you this way. Notre Dame, with only 2-3 ACC-controlled football games per year (the # of ACC's home games in the 5/8ths schedule) for ESPN to broadcast, has reportedly delivered to the ACC $2-3 million more
per team
per year (or something around $40-45 million total per year), while only sharing in 1/15th of the 20% that makes up the conference's non-football revenue. ND also helped to strengthen the ACC's bowl line-up and will play a major factor in any cable channel launch because the hypothetic channel is going to carry ND content, including football content, as seen by what they are doing on the ACCDN. Their five game schedule is also going to help the conference strength of schedule without going to an unpopular 9th conference game, which has been a repeated point of emphasis for the new football playoff selection committee.
With ND, the ACC is estimated to make, just from ESPN media deal, about ~$20 million per year per team on average over the life of this current contract (or about $280-300 million per year). The entire American Athletic Conference is getting ~$18-19 million per year (or <$2 million per team) with its current ESPN contract, and ESPN is sublicensing a bunch of that content to the CBS Sports Network (15 football games a year and 30 hoops) because they don't even want to show it on ESPNU. How valuable is UConn in this market, a footprint already covered by Syracuse and Boston College?
Can UConn even bring enough for the rest of the members to break even on an affiliate membership in basketball? They'd have to deliver $4 million per year just on hoops (when they're currently getting <$2 million from ESPN for hoops+football, plus maybe a little more with the 12-game American CBS basketball contract) for everyone else in the conference to just stay at the same level financially, and yet there would be no gain for the members. If the ACC wasn't interested in JHU as a lax affiliate, why would it be interested in UConn?
I'm not anti-UConn in any sense than I just don't think their addition makes sense at this point considering football is the primary driver of conference health and security.
