(10-13-2020 11:29 AM)Captain Bearcat Wrote: (10-13-2020 05:56 AM)DawgNBama Wrote: (10-13-2020 05:47 AM)schmolik Wrote: (10-12-2020 10:30 PM)JRsec Wrote: (10-12-2020 10:06 PM)Frank the Tank Wrote: We’ll just need to agree to disagree on this point. Schools are going to be dragged into the pay for play world kicking and screaming, but at the end of the day, they’ll pay up no matter what their academic standing might be.
This is a football-focused board, but endorsement income is more likely to have a bigger impact in basketball (as they don’t even try to hide that recruiting *today* is tied to the shoe companies). Duke is the highest ranked Power Five school in the US News rankings after Stanford... yet they’re getting top one-and-done basketball stars better than Kentucky and Kansas. Do we really think that Duke is giving that up? Do we really think that Duke boosters haven’t engaged in recruiting tactics that would make the fiercest Alabama football boosters blush?
Once again - this is about going after elite students and families that are willing to pay $80,000 per year out-of-pocket for college to go to the Ivy League. Power Five membership is a HUGE selling point for the handful of the elite schools that have it. I’ve seen it firsthand with with Northwestern competing with the University of Chicago. It’s what Vandy, Duke and Wake Forest use in competing against Emory. It’s what Stanford uses against Harvard, Yale and Princeton. How they perform against Alabama and Ohio State is almost irrelevant - they’re playing an entirely different game in terms of wanting to get the best talent in their student bodies overall and big-time sports are a huge differentiator there.
We don't have to agree to disagree Frank. I agree under the current model every effort will be made by these schools to remain. I'm suggesting that a different organizational paradigm will arise out of this and the old P5 as we knew it will be dramatically changed and with it we will see of necessity a separation of academic conferences (consortia) into a dichotomy of academic only consortia not bound by athletic competition and Athletic consortia not bound to academic associations but organized around competitive and financial principles which will radically change the world of conferences we see now, at least at the upper level. I think this will alter basketball conferences as well.
Why?
There is too much money to be made by a change in associations to match commitment to sport and the networks will more than willingly fund it. And I also believe that venerated associations in academia will survive and thrive by separating from the sports component of campus life. It will be a big adjustment for the Big 10 but a Big 10 academic consortium might well include a Texas, Texas A&M, Florida, North Carolina, Duke, Virginia, or Vanderbilt without having any impact on athletic association.
In other words I think the trend initiated by pay for play and by networks seeking the highest possible ratings will lead to a revolution that should have occurred 80 years ago. Universities should be freed to pursue their best possible exposure and financial reward in sports and also to pursue their best possible academic alliances for the sake of research and scientific discovery. It's really rather asinine and counter productive to continue simply because this is the way we've always done it since the early 1800's.
So I don't disagree with your assertion of what Duke, Northwestern, and Vandy will want to do, I just foresee a total reorganization of schools competing athletically with athletic peers, and researching academically with academic peers where such relationships no longer remain mutually inclusive to the detriment of both.
As long as the major decisions of university athletic conference membership are determined by university presidents and not athletic directors, academics will always matter.
And even if we made it entirely based on athletics or financial, I'm not buying it would include the entire SEC minus Vanderbilt either. You think every public SEC member is an "athletic peer" with Alabama and Auburn? You think Vandy is the only athletic dead weight in the conference? If I'm ESPN and I can choose only which schools I'd want to pay for, I'd dump more than Vanderbilt from the SEC. There might even be a list of only about 30 FBS schools worth paying big bucks for in college football (and my Illini definitely wouldn't be on the list). You could add a few more like Duke, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Kansas for men's basketball (maybe then Illinois would make the list in a few years). But we're not just going to give everyone in the SEC a free pass to the party and say they're better than everyone else. In no planet are Mississippi and Mississippi State going to be better than Ohio State or Clemson.
Schmolik, the reason why ESPN is holding back, IMO, is that new media order (FAANG) really wants this badly too. However, ESPN can hold off the new media order by dangling the carrot of being able to keep a lot of old rivals together, something that the new media order is NOT big on, IMO.
Put another way: would you prefer JR Ewing from Dallas or Governor Gavin Newsome??
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Or, ESPN thinks that it's more valuable to have a 65 team P5 than a 30-40 team breakaway. Why would they purposefully devalue 25 of their properties?
All a breakaway would do is make college sports less popular. An Indiana fan won't suddenly become an Ohio State fan if a breakaway happens. They'll just stop caring.
The other thing is: the "deadweight" isn't really that dead. The Big 10 and SEC are making about $45 million per school. ACC, PAC, and Big 12 are 25-30 million. The American is making about $8 million. So the bottom P5 / top G5 schools are probably worth about $15 million.
Do the math: if you take out the bottom 4 SEC schools ($60 million, minimum), you bump the payment up from $44 million to $55 million. That's a lot, but it's not world-breaking.
And you'd lose a lot. You're losing more than just 100 year old rivalries and academic associations. You're losing exposure to potential students. You're increasing travel budgets as you cut out the heart of the conference. And does Tennessee really want an extra 2-3 losses a year when they have to play Auburn & LSU instead of Vanderbilt & Ole Miss? How will the additional losses affect ticket sales?
The Big Ten has even more to lose, because all of the worst programs still bring value to the conference. Who do you kick out? Northwestern, Illinois, Indiana, and Rutgers? That loses most of your local exposure in Chicago and New York media, and your biggest basketball fanbase. Ohio State doesn't want that.
You should do your homework on this first. Enter Sandman has a thread pinned in the important threads at the top of the page that would help you.
And you should try reading the premise of the different posters before wading in.
For starters the Big 10 earned 55 million plus per school last year and the SEC 45 million plus. The SEC schools will start at 68 plus by 2024 under the new contract. There is more at stake sure. For now that doesn't detract from your statement. But the premise of some positions is that pay for play will change that landscape. Content based payouts instead of market based payouts is already changing it because streaming gives companies the ability to actually pay per viewer. New technology outstripped the market math of the old subscription fee model just a couple of years after the 2012 realignment.
The money now is driven by games that on a major carrier deliver a large national audience (think 12 to 14 million) over regional audiences of much less.
ESPN has already locked up the ACC and SEC through the mid 2030's for all 3 tiers of sports rights. They are likely to bid on the Big 12 for the same reason, or perhaps engineer a placement of the most valuable parts of the Big 12 within their other holdings. Even if the so called FAANG companies do get involved, and so far they've very publicly demurred, they won't be able to land the schools in the hottest viewing regions unless they go all out for the Big 10 and FOX just chooses to bow out, and I don't see that coming either.
So that gets us to why pay for play is going to change things. For one it directly challenges the Big 10's amateur more Ivy like approach. It is why a split between football first schools in the Big 10 could happen if their operating model isn't changed.
For privates it will come down to funding since state appropriations won't be helping them out as they will for larger state schools. Mid sized to smaller state schools could however run into budgetary constraints. That doesn't mean they will just that states with budgetary issues may see the need to fund Big State U who generates 150 million in revenue and not have the same exuberance over doing it where the return on investment is much less. Even for well funded privates it will present some challenges, especially if Title IX ratios aren't adjusted and some sports remain strictly amateur and others are treated semi professionally.
Then there is the network angle. ESPN doesn't have to cull anyone. All they have to do is keep getting those rights signed up. When change hits and some opt out the programs will cull themselves and as they do that gives ESPN an opportunity to do two things.
1. They get to renegotiate the contracts of the conferences which have had schools bow out of the pay for play, and in spite of insistence this won't happen which prima facia sounds logical, it will happen because not all institutions or states are gong to be prepared to handle it. Let's say that the ACC loses 2, the SEC 1, the PAC 2, and the Big 12 and Big 10 none. Now we are down to 60 schools so inventory for games has dropped.
2. So to keep the payouts up conferences are going to need to add schools to increase inventory and if those schools are brand name schools it will enhance content value as well. So in all likelihood ESPN gets to do a little consolidation for their own benefit. Or, perhaps the remaining schools see the vulnerable position they are in and decide with the defections from their ranks to collectivize for the sake of leverage. Either way composition changes and the opportunity for more brand on brand games for national ad revenue at its highest rate goes up.
My point is change is coming, it will be radical, and the network can play it either way and make more. What's more is the change will be external to the networks getting them off the hook for public displeasure. People will not like it initially because people are resistant to all change, but week after week of boring reruns and they'll be back for sports.
What's unclear to me is whether attendance at games will ever get back to a fever pitch with people donating significant sums just to be able to purchase tickets. HD TV, the breaking of routine with COVID, and the societal junk will all take a toll on the actual enthusiasm to attend, but the boredom of routine will bring seasonal sports back into view soon enough.
So as I see it the networks don't have to do anything but sign up the rights. The rest of it will play out leaving the networks better options and opportunities to naturally rearrange things to benefit themselves.
Meanwhile the P5 will be caught off guard like academics always are because they are naturally a backwards looking group. They are steeped in tradition and very reticent to change. But once academic endeavor is completely separated from athletic endeavor a beneficial revolution will occur permitting both to seek associations independently of one another and for the betterment of both and it is in that world that some on the athletic side will be left behind and some who have held aspirations on the academic side, but not inclusion in groups like AAU, will as well.
Think of it this way. Your school will be in a athletic conference and an academic conference and the two won't necessarily be the same conference. Therefore with their academic alliance secure schools like Ohio State, U.S.C., Washington, North Carolina, etc will be free to align themselves wherever it best suits their athletic needs. Geography could become a bigger factor, but level of competition, and ability to draw a national audience certainly will play a part with regard to with whom it is you play sports.