Lots of good stuff in here. It has the post-season analysis and then links to an analysis of all three tiers.
Of particular note to me was this in the Tier 3 analysis:
"The interesting thing is that most believe that conference networks are created to reap huge windfalls of money due to how cable channels are bundled.
However, creating the channel and it making money is more an offshoot of the conference receiving exposure for the broadcast. As conferences grew in size, they had more games to put on the air. Those established channels, however, per our lead into this topic, only have so much space available to show a game. ESPN, for instance, only has space for four games on a Saturday, but there are thirty three football games shown on average each week.
Thirty three football games is enough to fill eight channels for twelve hours on Saturdays, not including highly profitable sports commentary shows, like College Gameday. There simply isn’t space to pay for them all as the bulk of college football games don’t have large audiences.
Of the 470+ games that are broadcast in a season, only 256 of them are rated by Nielsen to track how large their audience may be. The rest of the games, e.g. those that are not rated, are considered to have “negligible” viewing audiences. Of 256 rated games, half of them have audiences under a million people. To put that in perspective, that is lower than recent episodes of Spongebob Squarepants, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, Property Brothers, American Pickers, or reruns of Full House. Just to name a few.
On the other end of the spectrum,
Madam Secretary, which you may never have tuned into, averages a higher audience per week on CBS than the best SEC games generate in any given season and twice as much as the average audience of all of the SEC on CBS games. College football, even in the SEC or Big Ten, is not the NFL, where tens of millions of people tune in to every game.
Each conference has big names and strong teams and sports benefits from 93% of it is watched live, which makes it a premium. However, The risk for networks is estimating who may have good seasons, because above all as was shown in the past two analysis, winning teams generate the biggest audiences."
I also noted this:
"When looking at the value of a Tier Three package, you really need to look at where a university pulls its students. Some schools draw nationally and have a smaller group of local students. Most state schools, on the other hand, draw primarily from an area of about three to four hundred miles around the university. Let’s look at two ways schools have handled this same situation differently.
Notre Dame is located in Northern Indiana, just east from Chicago. While it definitely has a local presence and is quite popular in Chicago, particularly on the South Side,
its alumni are in two main bands. The first resides within the metroplex from Boston to DC, an area of nearly fifty million people nowhere near South Bend, Indiana. The second grouping is on the West Coast, namely California.
When Notre Dame considered how to work its sports conference affiliation, being tied to a Midwestern or Southern conference made little sense. Instead it made a deal with the ACC, to play five football games a year against the conference, which had schools up and down the east coast, including Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Florida and Virginia. The rest of their football schedule allowed them to ensure they kept games against USC and Stanford to keep their West Coast ties, while the rest of their non-football sports would bundle up within the ACC’s Tier Two and Three media deal with ESPN, where all of their men’s and women’s teams would be featured on the East Coast.
It is a perfect match for what the university is trying to market."
Anyway, I thought there was a lot of discussion stuff in there, including the highlighted portion which seems to say that branding matters even in a conference network/carriage situation.
http://big12fanatics.com/media-matters-2...st-season/
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Big 12 Fanatics Media Matters Analysis
