What if the Big 10 or the SEC implodes and college football ends up with just 4 super conferences, does the overall revenue from TV change much? Won't people still want to watch Alabama or Michigan?

no.

Maybe for a few years but long term no. And to make this even work we would have to increase the amount of games played during the season.

Scott's philosophy was that fewer major players meant more leverage with the networks. Fox and ESPN didn't want the Big 12 to go away and tried to talk the Texoma 5 from going to the Pac 16.

So from a purely negotiating power standpoint, it goes up.

(06-16-2014 08:44 PM)bullet Wrote:  Scott's philosophy was that fewer major players meant more leverage with the networks. Fox and ESPN didn't want the Big 12 to go away and tried to talk the Texoma 5 from going to the Pac 16.

So from a purely negotiating power standpoint, it goes up.

I think the negotiation power of the individual conferences goes up a little from 5 to 4. I think the negotiating power of the conferences goes up a lot if the P5 were to condense to one or two leagues of 30ish teams each, especially for a broadly market distributed league like a BigPAC merger.

The willingness of Fox and ESPN to bribe Texas to not join another league tells you all you need to know about the potential negotiation leverage consolidation can bring.

I think that 5 major conferences going to 4 is almost inevitable. It may be that after Texas and OK leave the Big 12, my team (BYU) finally gets our invite to the Big 12. Probably will happen after the next Big 12 TV contract comes up short due to limited markets.

But at that point independence may be better than a picked-over Big 12 that will not have access to the upper-level bowls and playoff, so it may be something we pass on anyway. The Big 12 seems to be making the same mistakes the Big East made in the late 90s - instead of bringing good football teams in when the conference had something valuable to offer, trying to maximize per-team revenue and then falling apart when the high-value teams leave.

Going to 4 is only a dress rehearsal for going to 2 - one called Fox and one called ESPN.

B1G + PAC + XII = Fox
SEC + ACC + 7 schools = ESPN

The SEC may invite a school from the XII as ESPN jockeys for position, but Fox will just push the XII to add schools from ESPN G5 leagues to fill in missing parts of the footprint. ESPN may add some Mountain West schools to the SEC-ACC to keep Fox from locking up the entire western United States.

(06-19-2014 08:41 PM)chargeradio Wrote:  Going to 4 is only a dress rehearsal for going to 2 - one called Fox and one called ESPN.

B1G + PAC + XII = Fox
SEC + ACC + 7 schools = ESPN

The SEC may invite a school from the XII as ESPN jockeys for position, but Fox will just push the XII to add schools from ESPN G5 leagues to fill in missing parts of the footprint. ESPN may add some Mountain West schools to the SEC-ACC to keep Fox from locking up the entire western United States.

So you expect 36 schools that in a sense recreate the 23 team Southern Conference of 1932 that had Bama, Auburn, Duke, GT, NC State, UNC, Tennessee, LSU, Ole Miss, MSU, Vandy, Kentucky, Florida, Clemson, South Carolina, UVa, VT, Maryland, Tulane, Sewanee, Georgia, VMI, and Washington and Lee.

Tulane, Sewanee, VMI, W&L all dropped down.

TAMU, Arkansas, Mizzou, Miami, FSU, Louisville, Wake Forest, BC, Syracuse, Pitt, and ND. That's 29 schools.

What 7 would appeal to other 29?

First of all I don't see the SEC or Big 10 imploding. I think the ACC is stable. And the PAC are like the Swiss, they are too remote to be worth invading, so if it happened I think it would come from a parsing of the Big 12. And because there are only 10 schools the parsing of that 1/5th of the playoff money might make it a bit more worthwhile.

I don't know that the TV revenue would get that much of a bump but the 5th share of the playoff money and extra bowl affiliations would benefit the Big 10, the SEC and the ACC. Why? The Big 10 and SEC would get a 1/4 share each of that 1/5th of playoff money for the sake of only 2 additions. The ACC would fare potentially even better if they added only 1 for their 1/4 of the 1/5th of playoff money. It's the PAC that would have to rely upon the new markets and a TV bump (which they would get) because their 1/4 of 1/5 of the playoff money would come at the expense of adding 4 schools. But likely those 4 would give them central time zone games which if properly monetized should help them distribute more of their product.

So in essence each school coming into any of the conferences would bring their own market and content value plus depending on the distribution per conference about 15 million each for the two additions to the SEC and Big 10, about 30 million for the single school going to the ACC, and a little over 7 million each for the 4 schools going to the PAC.

Bowl money would see a slight increase for each of the remaining conferences as well because the absorbed Big 12 slots.

Finally the Big 10 and SEC and PAC would see a boost in revenue because of market additions for their networks. How much would be dependent upon the addition and the size of their followings and the markets they would add.