(08-21-2014 12:19 AM)ChrisLords Wrote: If it can be dissolved at any time, where is the extra $2 million dollars going to come from? Maybe the G5 agreed to it in negotiations with the CFP but I doubt they can dissolve it without approval.
Either by making the per team amount a smaller number or by taking money away from the Tier 2 and/or Tier 3 payouts.
There's some flex built into the current arrangement, to avoid having to renegotiate for each and every realignment. For instance, when Navy joins the AAC and it goes to 12 in FB, that will come out of the "conference ladder" pool. If the Sunbelt were to invite UMass FB-only and add $1m to the CFP payout that the Sunbelt receives, that's where that $1m would come from as well.
The ranking ladder pool being based on what's over after the Tier 1 payments and the payment to the conference that sends a school to the Access Bowl is why there are no hard-and-fast breakdowns of that pool, just estimates.
But that is flexibility that is already in place under the current agreement: changing the cap would require renegotiating the CFP distribution agreement.
As far as the assumption that its "no big deal" to renegotiate the framework, remember that assumption is convenient for those who like to play fantasy conference realignment, because it makes expansions to 14 (or higher) more likely which makes realignment more likely which makes the fantasy seem more realistic, which, it would appear, adds to the fun factor of the fantasy.
(08-21-2014 01:11 AM)Wedge Wrote: Right, the cap of $12 million per G5 league is something that the CFP would have to remove. The G5 conferences can't unilaterally grant themselves more CFP money. If they could unilaterally take as much as they want, they would give themselves a helluva lot more than $12 or 14 million per year.
The CFP doesn't much care how the Go5 distribute the pool of money they are being given, so long as there is an agreement in place for how its done. The Go5 cannot increase the total amount, but it can change the amount that goes in the Tier1 distribution of $1m per school up to 12 schools per conference ... as long as there is agreement on the change.
(08-21-2014 10:54 AM)Underdog Wrote: This was a bad deal for the MAC in my opinion. $1 mil per school should have been the minimum. The MAC should have offered to play even more weeknight games because that’s its marketing niche—MACtion. As the weeknight games increase, so does the $$$. Maybe a game before Monday night football, Tuesday, Wednesday, a game before Thursday night football…. That is the only way I think the MAC could have gotten more $$$.
Sure, 5x what they were getting before is a bad deal, because they
should have got 6x what they were getting before,
at a minimum ... because sports forum speculative media rights negotiations is always easier than real world media rights negotiation, and always has more money on the table that likely wasn't ever there in the real world.
It seems likely that the
reason there is a market value for the midweek MAC November games is that other conference that are willing to do midweek games earlier in the season balk at doing them in November. Indeed, the greater their attendance, the more ticket sales a Northern school sacrifices for late season evening games period, on top of the greater monetary sacrifice from any midweek game.
It seems highly likely that there would be substantial diminishing returns from either more November midweek games (since two per night Tuesday and Wednesday is what ESPN wants), or from October midweek games (since ESPN has more October midweek inventory available), and given the downsides of midweek games, it makes sense to only do the ones that ESPN is willing to suitably reward the MAC for ... where the value of #MACtion games is part of the increase in value to $10m/yr in the 2017/18 - 2026/27 time frame.
And the rest of the value is adding ESPN3 inventory, where the lack of channel constraints means that ESPN3 content, especially for BBall, is "auto-regionalizing", and there is no opportunity cost downside to making MAC-produced content available on ESPN3 alongside any other ESPN3 BBall content going on at the same time, so long as it is suitable quality.
But its only ESPN with its bargaining leverage and massive inventory of streaming product that is in a position to monetize streaming sports through ISP carriage fees, so its not like there is going to be a lot of competing bids for that content ... a likely reason for ESPN being willing to assign a useful value to those rights is to prevent the emergence of a rival that is in the position to play the same game.
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MAC and ESPN sign 13 year deal
