(10-11-2021 12:40 PM)esayem Wrote:  

(10-11-2021 09:45 AM)DavidSt Wrote:  

(10-10-2021 09:42 PM)seaking4steel Wrote:  

(10-10-2021 07:54 PM)Stugray2 Wrote:  

(10-10-2021 06:51 PM)seaking4steel Wrote:  App State and Marshall got over 1 Million viewers on ESPN for a Thursday Night game (they were competing against the NFL for views too). App State and ECU got 36k in the stands in Charlotte on a Thursday night. Charlotte couldn't even sell out their small stadium when Duke came to town.

LO, it was on ESPN and the ONLY game. That's actually not a killer rating for Thursday night. Temple vs. South Florida would do that well. That weekend a bunch of games had between 3 and 6 million on Saturday.

How do they do on crowded Saturday? It's just not enough to matter at all.

If you think schools that average 23k+ in attendance like App State and Marshall won't matter, then just wait until nobody tunes in for Charlotte and UTSA.

UTSA drew like close to 30,000 when they play P5 schools.

So what? That goes for any G5 team in Texas playing a regional P5.

Rice drew 42,000 vs Texas in 2019.

They played in the Texans Stadium and 35,000 were Texas fans.

(10-11-2021 02:36 PM)johnbragg Wrote:  

(10-11-2021 12:46 PM)GreenBison Wrote:  

(10-11-2021 09:32 AM)b0ndsj0ns Wrote:  

(10-11-2021 09:19 AM)GreenBison Wrote:  

(10-09-2021 04:50 PM)Attackcoog Wrote:  So what? Even with this regional plan, the P5 will still be taking from the G5 at will so any stability at that level is an illusion. Furthermore, this doesn’t create stability by lifting everyone upward—-it creates stability by taking the top conference and splitting it up in such a dilutive way that all 3 conferences are now going to get $500K a school CUSA level deals.

The basic concept has some merit—-but the only way this type of thing works is if all the schools are currently getting very similar media payouts. Under that scenario—-swapping schools around has no financial repercussions beyond cutting travel expenses. But if one group is getting 7 million a team and another is getting 400K a team—-those swaps don’t make much sense to the higher earners.

Playing more regional rivals creates more fan interest and ticket sales. So more butts in seats over the entire season can be a nice financial bump at the end of the year.

A lot of the Sun-Belt schools have been playing "regional rivals" for years and don't draw fans in any significant numbers. Playing exclusively regional schools is not going to turn schools who struggle to draw 20k into schools that draw 30-40k. You pretty much either have that fan base or you don't. The only "regional" opponent for ECU that would have any actual material impact on attendance is App. Not that it would draw more ECU fans than your average conference game but they'd probably bring 3k a year to Dowdy, but no one else is gonna do that.

App State vs ECU = 36,752 (9-2-2021)
Marshall at ECU = 46,317 (11-23-2012)

App State at ECU = 49,023 (9-1-2012)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_East_...tball_team

So in 2012, when App State was FCS, they "brought more fans" to ECU than mighty rival Marshall did.

Boone might be a tad closer to ECU than Huntington, WV.

(10-11-2021 02:36 PM)johnbragg Wrote:  

(10-11-2021 12:46 PM)GreenBison Wrote:  

(10-11-2021 09:32 AM)b0ndsj0ns Wrote:  

(10-11-2021 09:19 AM)GreenBison Wrote:  

(10-09-2021 04:50 PM)Attackcoog Wrote:  So what? Even with this regional plan, the P5 will still be taking from the G5 at will so any stability at that level is an illusion. Furthermore, this doesn’t create stability by lifting everyone upward—-it creates stability by taking the top conference and splitting it up in such a dilutive way that all 3 conferences are now going to get $500K a school CUSA level deals.

The basic concept has some merit—-but the only way this type of thing works is if all the schools are currently getting very similar media payouts. Under that scenario—-swapping schools around has no financial repercussions beyond cutting travel expenses. But if one group is getting 7 million a team and another is getting 400K a team—-those swaps don’t make much sense to the higher earners.

Playing more regional rivals creates more fan interest and ticket sales. So more butts in seats over the entire season can be a nice financial bump at the end of the year.

A lot of the Sun-Belt schools have been playing "regional rivals" for years and don't draw fans in any significant numbers. Playing exclusively regional schools is not going to turn schools who struggle to draw 20k into schools that draw 30-40k. You pretty much either have that fan base or you don't. The only "regional" opponent for ECU that would have any actual material impact on attendance is App. Not that it would draw more ECU fans than your average conference game but they'd probably bring 3k a year to Dowdy, but no one else is gonna do that.

App State vs ECU = 36,752 (9-2-2021)
Marshall at ECU = 46,317 (11-23-2012)

App State at ECU = 49,023 (9-1-2012)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_East_...tball_team

So in 2012, when App State was FCS, they "brought more fans" to ECU than mighty rival Marshall did.

Yep. I think it's a not unreasonable argument that ECU-App playing every year would be a good thing for both sides, but that can be accomplished either by the AAC adding just App or even easier App and ECU just agreeing to play each other OOC a lot (which I think they probably should since the days of ACC schools coming to Greenville are probably coming to an end).

(10-11-2021 02:42 PM)PicksUp Wrote:  

(10-11-2021 02:36 PM)johnbragg Wrote:  

(10-11-2021 12:46 PM)GreenBison Wrote:  

(10-11-2021 09:32 AM)b0ndsj0ns Wrote:  

(10-11-2021 09:19 AM)GreenBison Wrote:  Playing more regional rivals creates more fan interest and ticket sales. So more butts in seats over the entire season can be a nice financial bump at the end of the year.

A lot of the Sun-Belt schools have been playing "regional rivals" for years and don't draw fans in any significant numbers. Playing exclusively regional schools is not going to turn schools who struggle to draw 20k into schools that draw 30-40k. You pretty much either have that fan base or you don't. The only "regional" opponent for ECU that would have any actual material impact on attendance is App. Not that it would draw more ECU fans than your average conference game but they'd probably bring 3k a year to Dowdy, but no one else is gonna do that.

App State vs ECU = 36,752 (9-2-2021)
Marshall at ECU = 46,317 (11-23-2012)

App State at ECU = 49,023 (9-1-2012)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_East_...tball_team

So in 2012, when App State was FCS, they "brought more fans" to ECU than mighty rival Marshall did.

Boone might be a tad closer to ECU than Huntington, WV.

Tad bit, but Huntington is a tad bit closer than El Paso and ECU drew about 1500 more fans for their game against you guys in 2012 than Marshall.

(10-11-2021 02:41 PM)Big Frog II Wrote:  

(10-11-2021 12:40 PM)esayem Wrote:  

(10-11-2021 09:45 AM)DavidSt Wrote:  

(10-10-2021 09:42 PM)seaking4steel Wrote:  

(10-10-2021 07:54 PM)Stugray2 Wrote:  LO, it was on ESPN and the ONLY game. That's actually not a killer rating for Thursday night. Temple vs. South Florida would do that well. That weekend a bunch of games had between 3 and 6 million on Saturday.

How do they do on crowded Saturday? It's just not enough to matter at all.

If you think schools that average 23k+ in attendance like App State and Marshall won't matter, then just wait until nobody tunes in for Charlotte and UTSA.

UTSA drew like close to 30,000 when they play P5 schools.

So what? That goes for any G5 team in Texas playing a regional P5.

Rice drew 42,000 vs Texas in 2019.

They played in the Texans Stadium and 35,000 were Texas fans.

Usually about 50/50 at Rice.

Rice did draw 50k for Air Force one year at Rice Stadium in the 2000s. They made a big effort to sell tickets for that particular game.

Lets even say this whole "regionalization" concept was an extremely serious proposal that Delaney thought could be beneficial for all parties involved. This quote presents a massive problem

"Media rights have not been priced for regionalization, a source said."

How are you supposed to present a serious proposal when you don't even have estimates for media rights values? Like there absolutely is a break even point where this could make sense for everyone, but you got to have an idea of what TV partners would pay for this to know if this reaches that level for any league other than C-USA.

(10-11-2021 03:05 PM)b0ndsj0ns Wrote:  Lets even say this whole "regionalization" concept was an extremely serious proposal that Delaney thought could be beneficial for all parties involved. This quote presents a massive problem

"Media rights have not been priced for regionalization, a source said."

How are you supposed to present a serious proposal when you don't even have estimates for media rights values? Like there absolutely is a break even point where this could make sense for everyone, but you got to have an idea of what TV partners would pay for this to know if this reaches that level for any league other than C-USA.

This proposal should have been a few years ago and should have only involved CUSA and the SBC. Now is not the time to do it when possibly multiple schools may be changing conferences. On the other hand, if schools want to move but can't easily afford exit/entrance fees, maybe this discussion between schools/conferences can facilitate that.

Any of the CUSA fans on here heard anything? Kinda surprised it's still been crickets thus far

(10-11-2021 03:14 PM)MinerInWisconsin Wrote:  

(10-11-2021 03:05 PM)b0ndsj0ns Wrote:  Lets even say this whole "regionalization" concept was an extremely serious proposal that Delaney thought could be beneficial for all parties involved. This quote presents a massive problem

"Media rights have not been priced for regionalization, a source said."

How are you supposed to present a serious proposal when you don't even have estimates for media rights values? Like there absolutely is a break even point where this could make sense for everyone, but you got to have an idea of what TV partners would pay for this to know if this reaches that level for any league other than C-USA.

This proposal should have been a few years ago and should have only involved CUSA and the SBC. Now is not the time to do it when possibly multiple schools may be changing conferences. On the other hand, if schools want to move but can't easily afford exit/entrance fees, maybe this discussion between schools/conferences can facilitate that.

Yeah it wouldn't have been an insanely high bar to clear to make this make financial sense for maybe almost all of C-USA and the Sun-Belt like 3 years ago. To make it work including even a weakened AAC? It's impossible in any real world situation. If there were enough schools worth what it would take to make this not be a big financial haircut for the AAC then both C-USA/Sun-Belt would currently be making double or triple their current rate and even if so there would be enough value in replacements for the AAC to just add the cream and keep their own deal relatively unchanged.

(10-11-2021 03:17 PM)RamblinRedWolf Wrote:  Any of the CUSA fans on here heard anything? Kinda surprised it's still been crickets thus far

I'd assume we won't hear anything at least until next week's in-person follow-up meeting, and I wouldn't expect much then either.

If you hear anything before then it would be something super-positive about it, and I don't see that kind of news coming for this.

There's zero benefit to doing it, ever. For anyone. Because the conferences are TV rights negotiating entities and diversity of region is one of the largest factors in TV negotiations.

You get put on the air, and compensated based on your appeal to as many viewers as possible. So a regional conference limits the number of possible viewers interested in your conference. This is why the Southwest Conference broke up.

"Travel expenses" is a counter-intuitive argument. Everyone seems to think that the further away a school is, the more travel expenses there are; but that's only true if you're taking a taxi or Uber.

There's no mileage structure to plane tickets. The places people go FREQUENTLY are (per mile) cheaper than the places travelers seldomly fly to.

Charlotte to Houston is twice as cheap to fly to as Charlotte to Marshall, because Houston's a huge market with a big airport so every airline is going to have dozens of flights daily into Houston; while going to Marshall, you need specific flights because there's fewer options.

The only significant savings travel wise by realigning conferences more geographically is if you can replace a FLIGHT with a bus trip. Everyone's going to fly if it's a over a 4 hour bus ride; and you're talking about like 48 schools across the country to possibly be in a league in; so there's not a lot of instances where you are going to replace flights with bus trips (outside of Texas, anyway).


And you also have to consider that even if you can add in more bus trips by changing conferences, chances are the nearby schools in different conferences are currently playing each other in NON-CONFERENCE ANYWAY, because it's nice and convenient. And it provides better cost certainty than being in a league together and trying to get games.


If you're App State, being in a different conference as Charlotte means you've got guaranteed home/home series with the Sun Belt teams.... AND IT'S EASY TO GET CHARLOTTE on the schedule because they're close. That's cost-certainty. If they're in a league with Charlotte, now they need to replace them on the OOC schedule and all the choices are further away, and are probably going to be LESS WILLING to do a home & home because it's harder for Texas State to visit Boone.

(10-11-2021 03:56 PM)JSchmack Wrote:  There's zero benefit to doing it, ever. For anyone. Because the conferences are TV rights negotiating entities and diversity of region is one of the largest factors in TV negotiations.

You get put on the air, and compensated based on your appeal to as many viewers as possible. So a regional conference limits the number of possible viewers interested in your conference. This is why the Southwest Conference broke up.

"Travel expenses" is a counter-intuitive argument. Everyone seems to think that the further away a school is, the more travel expenses there are; but that's only true if you're taking a taxi or Uber.

There's no mileage structure to plane tickets. The places people go FREQUENTLY are (per mile) cheaper than the places travelers seldomly fly to.

Charlotte to Houston is twice as cheap to fly to as Charlotte to Marshall, because Houston's a huge market with a big airport so every airline is going to have dozens of flights daily into Houston; while going to Marshall, you need specific flights because there's fewer options.

The only significant savings travel wise by realigning conferences more geographically is if you can replace a FLIGHT with a bus trip. Everyone's going to fly if it's a over a 4 hour bus ride; and you're talking about like 48 schools across the country to possibly be in a league in; so there's not a lot of instances where you are going to replace flights with bus trips (outside of Texas, anyway).


And you also have to consider that even if you can add in more bus trips by changing conferences, chances are the nearby schools in different conferences are currently playing each other in NON-CONFERENCE ANYWAY, because it's nice and convenient. And it provides better cost certainty than being in a league together and trying to get games.


If you're App State, being in a different conference as Charlotte means you've got guaranteed home/home series with the Sun Belt teams.... AND IT'S EASY TO GET CHARLOTTE on the schedule because they're close. That's cost-certainty. If they're in a league with Charlotte, now they need to replace them on the OOC schedule and all the choices are further away, and are probably going to be LESS WILLING to do a home & home because it's harder for Texas State to visit Boone.

Look---the plan has merit in some situations. For starters, the TV deals of conferences involved have to almost exactly the same media value so that any horse trading of schools has no real financial repercussions for the respective TV deals. Secondly---it needs to be the best road forward for both conferences.

In this case, the AAC deal is so much higher than the SB or CUSA deal that the AA teams are immediately out of the equation. That leaves just the Sunbelt and CUSA with roughly equal TV deal. Then you see that the Sunbelt schools may have a better route forward than CUSA. That pretty much torpedo's any way forward for this.

(10-11-2021 04:23 PM)Attackcoog Wrote:  

(10-11-2021 03:56 PM)JSchmack Wrote:  There's zero benefit to doing it, ever. For anyone. Because the conferences are TV rights negotiating entities and diversity of region is one of the largest factors in TV negotiations.

You get put on the air, and compensated based on your appeal to as many viewers as possible. So a regional conference limits the number of possible viewers interested in your conference. This is why the Southwest Conference broke up.

"Travel expenses" is a counter-intuitive argument. Everyone seems to think that the further away a school is, the more travel expenses there are; but that's only true if you're taking a taxi or Uber.

There's no mileage structure to plane tickets. The places people go FREQUENTLY are (per mile) cheaper than the places travelers seldomly fly to.

Charlotte to Houston is twice as cheap to fly to as Charlotte to Marshall, because Houston's a huge market with a big airport so every airline is going to have dozens of flights daily into Houston; while going to Marshall, you need specific flights because there's fewer options.

The only significant savings travel wise by realigning conferences more geographically is if you can replace a FLIGHT with a bus trip. Everyone's going to fly if it's a over a 4 hour bus ride; and you're talking about like 48 schools across the country to possibly be in a league in; so there's not a lot of instances where you are going to replace flights with bus trips (outside of Texas, anyway).


And you also have to consider that even if you can add in more bus trips by changing conferences, chances are the nearby schools in different conferences are currently playing each other in NON-CONFERENCE ANYWAY, because it's nice and convenient. And it provides better cost certainty than being in a league together and trying to get games.


If you're App State, being in a different conference as Charlotte means you've got guaranteed home/home series with the Sun Belt teams.... AND IT'S EASY TO GET CHARLOTTE on the schedule because they're close. That's cost-certainty. If they're in a league with Charlotte, now they need to replace them on the OOC schedule and all the choices are further away, and are probably going to be LESS WILLING to do a home & home because it's harder for Texas State to visit Boone.

Look---the plan has merit in some situations. For starters, the TV deals of conferences involved have to almost exactly the same media value so that any horse trading of schools has no real financial repercussions for the respective TV deals. Secondly---it needs to be the best road forward for both conferences.

In this case, the AAC deal is so much higher than the SB or CUSA deal that the AA teams are immediately out of the equation. That leaves just he Sunbelt and CUSA with roughly equal TV deal. Then you see that the Sunbelt schools may have a better route forward than CUSA. That pretty much torpedo's any way forward for this.

ESPN vs facebook are not even in the same ballpark. The new numbers to the SB from ESPN has not been announced by the conference so they could be better than most people think. Numbers I have heard are around 1.3 million per team.

(10-11-2021 05:21 PM)ValleyBoy Wrote:  

(10-11-2021 04:23 PM)Attackcoog Wrote:  

(10-11-2021 03:56 PM)JSchmack Wrote:  There's zero benefit to doing it, ever. For anyone. Because the conferences are TV rights negotiating entities and diversity of region is one of the largest factors in TV negotiations.

You get put on the air, and compensated based on your appeal to as many viewers as possible. So a regional conference limits the number of possible viewers interested in your conference. This is why the Southwest Conference broke up.

"Travel expenses" is a counter-intuitive argument. Everyone seems to think that the further away a school is, the more travel expenses there are; but that's only true if you're taking a taxi or Uber.

There's no mileage structure to plane tickets. The places people go FREQUENTLY are (per mile) cheaper than the places travelers seldomly fly to.

Charlotte to Houston is twice as cheap to fly to as Charlotte to Marshall, because Houston's a huge market with a big airport so every airline is going to have dozens of flights daily into Houston; while going to Marshall, you need specific flights because there's fewer options.

The only significant savings travel wise by realigning conferences more geographically is if you can replace a FLIGHT with a bus trip. Everyone's going to fly if it's a over a 4 hour bus ride; and you're talking about like 48 schools across the country to possibly be in a league in; so there's not a lot of instances where you are going to replace flights with bus trips (outside of Texas, anyway).


And you also have to consider that even if you can add in more bus trips by changing conferences, chances are the nearby schools in different conferences are currently playing each other in NON-CONFERENCE ANYWAY, because it's nice and convenient. And it provides better cost certainty than being in a league together and trying to get games.


If you're App State, being in a different conference as Charlotte means you've got guaranteed home/home series with the Sun Belt teams.... AND IT'S EASY TO GET CHARLOTTE on the schedule because they're close. That's cost-certainty. If they're in a league with Charlotte, now they need to replace them on the OOC schedule and all the choices are further away, and are probably going to be LESS WILLING to do a home & home because it's harder for Texas State to visit Boone.

Look---the plan has merit in some situations. For starters, the TV deals of conferences involved have to almost exactly the same media value so that any horse trading of schools has no real financial repercussions for the respective TV deals. Secondly---it needs to be the best road forward for both conferences.

In this case, the AAC deal is so much higher than the SB or CUSA deal that the AA teams are immediately out of the equation. That leaves just he Sunbelt and CUSA with roughly equal TV deal. Then you see that the Sunbelt schools may have a better route forward than CUSA. That pretty much torpedo's any way forward for this.

ESPN vs facebook are not even in the same ballpark. The new numbers to the SB from ESPN has not been announced by the conference so they could be better than most people think. Numbers I have heard are around 1.3 million per team.

Maybe at the very back end of the deal. The Sunbelt still had 5 more years left on the original 8 year deal. ESPN upped the number of linear windows by 50%. Forty percent of the new windows are on Saturday. That already was a HUGE concession to the Sunbelt when ESPN already had the rights to those games for 5 more years---its not like the Sunbelt had any real leverage so early in an 8 year deal. Id bet the 5 year extension just continues the slow climbing path that the original back loaded 8 year deal was tracking---with maybe a bump in 2026 when the extension actually kicks in. I could see it the extension ending at 1.3 a team in 2030-31.

C-USA and SBC deals aren't really for the MONEY, they're for the EXPOSURE.

I've heard that the C-USA deal basically the cost of production. Like, "ESPN gives you X dollars, but your league pays production costs, which happen to add up to X dollars."

And that way they can LOOK like they're getting a media deal and not look pathetic; get the exposure of ESPN, and ESPN is really getting the content for free.

(10-11-2021 09:50 AM)johnbragg Wrote:  

(10-11-2021 09:19 AM)GreenBison Wrote:  Playing more regional rivals creates more fan interest and ticket sales. So more butts in seats over the entire season can be a nice financial bump at the end of the year.

That's not really true at the G5 level, or Marshall wouldn't have left their bus-league buddies in the MAC.

Marshall and its fan base have evolved dramatically over the last 10 years. You're not wrong about that time when MU left the MAC, but the evidence is outdated, and too, there's just a general preference for traveling south over traveling north... and/or so many of us Herd alums have moved south anyhow.

What I'm asserting is, no more are Marshall fans unified behind a goal/dream of making the national stage in a NY6 bowl game. The contentment with CUSA 3.0 was at the same time astounding and disappointing for too few of us, while a huge share of the fanbase sided with Mike Hamrick's decision to not even make any noise as-if to inject Marshall into the AAC conversation.

Hypocritically, many of the same fans who can still be found in the Herd online forum archives placing total blame on Mark Snyder for the retrenchment from the Pruett glory years and failure to succeed in CUSA 2.0... suddenly were the same woe-is-me voices complaining that Marshall never stood a chance in CUSA 2.0 b/c of the lesser athletic budget.

Eventually, they just gave up caring about "national prominence" as former president Dan Angel spoke of back-when, and settled for the hope just to win and dominate--didn't matter that the opposition had little to no regard, just win baby. That was, honestly, the echo one would read and hear over and over and over again.

As sad as I was/am about that evolution, on the other hand, those Herd fans, turns out, are not actually wrong... ie, practically all of the non-auto schools, in cold hard reality, are in a ridiculous keystone cops situation, fighting over scraps, and in the big picture, they don't gain a whole lot in comparison to what would be plausible in an environment where all collaborate and synchronize their muscle movement into one... and yes, start funneling efforts into a series of tighter geographical footprints, each yielding a champion that, by design, reserve longer haul games for later in the season, pitting the #1s vs #1s, #2s vs. #2s and so on.

(10-11-2021 04:23 PM)Attackcoog Wrote:  Look---the plan has merit in some situations. For starters, the TV deals of conferences involved have to almost exactly the same media value so that any horse trading of schools has no real financial repercussions for the respective TV deals. Secondly---it needs to be the best road forward for both conferences.

Okay, let's say that C-USA and SBC have the same media deal, so that's not a factor. And the MWC/AAC/MAC are locked into membership after AAC takes four C-USA schools: UAB, North Texas, UTSA and Old Dominion. I really don't want to argue about who the AAC takes. Everyone ignore that and focus on the ramifications of the hypothetical

20 teams left in C-USA and SBC. And they work together, swap some members and Western group of 10 and an Eastern Group of 10, right? Sun Belt is the West, C-USA is the East for the fewest swaps: Four. C-USA trades UTEP, Rice, La Tech and So Miss; SBC trades App St, Coastal, Ga St, Georgia Southern.

SBC: So Alabama, Troy, ULM, ULL, Texas St, Ark St, UTEP, Rice, La Tech and So Miss.
CUSA: Charlotte, Marshall, MTSU, WKU, FIU, FAU, App St, Coastal, Ga St, Ga Southern.

The idea here is that:
A. You save money creating a few more bus trips and needing less flights.
B. Your inventory is better because local rivalries are more intense.

Sure, valid. But what comes NEXT? How are they better off?

Here's the last 8 years of performance by the conferences:

NO SWAPS:
C-USA: .478 football, .506 MBB
SBC: .488 football, .517 MBB

TRADE:
C-USA: .495 football, .528 MBB
SBC: .446 football, .505 MBB

So Sun Belt gets worse, C-USA gets better. Um, if I'm the Sun Belt, I'm saying no thanks. But I'll pretend they play nice for a second.


Now what happens with the NEXT TV DEAL?

NEW C-USA has the states of WV, KY, TN, FL, NC, GA, SC in their footprint. Total population of 61 million people.
NEW SBC has the states of TX, LA, AR, AL in their footprint. Total population of 41 million people.

But let's look at it BEFORE:
C-USA spanning from El Paso to Marshall to Miami: 82 million people.
SBC spanning from Texas to the Carolinas: 68 million people.

The argument is ALWAYS going to be "How many of those people actually care about your product?" But you are going from a much better starting point when you
Walk in saying "82 and 68" vs "61 and 41."

The ONLY WAY it can possibly work is there's Grant of Rights given to a media company that is 50/50 owned by the SBC/CUSA, which negotiates every media deal collectively as a group, and divides it evenly among the 20 schools. (Effectively, one financial entity, but two conferences competitively for the purpose of TWO SHARES of NCAA auto bids and CFP shares).


A socialist construct WORKS when the members view themselves as true equals (within a limited capacity of course). If you're Louisiana Tech... do you want Louisiana and Monroe to be your equals? If you're North Texas, do you think you bring more to the table than Texas State or Arkansas State?

(10-11-2021 06:40 PM)JSchmack Wrote:  C-USA and SBC deals aren't really for the MONEY, they're for the EXPOSURE.

I've heard that the C-USA deal basically the cost of production. Like, "ESPN gives you X dollars, but your league pays production costs, which happen to add up to X dollars."

And that way they can LOOK like they're getting a media deal and not look pathetic; get the exposure of ESPN, and ESPN is really getting the content for free.

Unless you're a Sun Belter because their TV deal is a selling point for expansion according to their fans even though 5 of their 10 football schools lost money according to the latest data presented by the Knight Commission.

The TV networks are trying to make money off of Gang if 5 schools where they can. There are 130 FBS teams. Games typically last 3-4 hours. There's only 24 hours in day and maybe 3/4 of that is during the day and evening when most people could watch a game on a Saturday.

The Autonomy Conferences have priority for TV schedules. They will get more Saturday games because they bring the money, and they have the power.

If a Gang of 5 school wants to be seen, they'll either play on some obscure network, on a non-Saturday, or both in most cases depending on the market. In the East where Power Conferences crowd the market, that is moreso the case. In the West that is not the case and Mountain West schools have a tendency to play more games on Saturdays because their markets aren't crowded. Plus, they are in timezones where 75% of the East is pretty much done with their games by 5pm Pacific Time.

So, yes, it's mainly about exposure not TV revenue.

(10-11-2021 02:41 PM)Big Frog II Wrote:  

(10-11-2021 12:40 PM)esayem Wrote:  

(10-11-2021 09:45 AM)DavidSt Wrote:  

(10-10-2021 09:42 PM)seaking4steel Wrote:  

(10-10-2021 07:54 PM)Stugray2 Wrote:  LO, it was on ESPN and the ONLY game. That's actually not a killer rating for Thursday night. Temple vs. South Florida would do that well. That weekend a bunch of games had between 3 and 6 million on Saturday.

How do they do on crowded Saturday? It's just not enough to matter at all.

If you think schools that average 23k+ in attendance like App State and Marshall won't matter, then just wait until nobody tunes in for Charlotte and UTSA.

UTSA drew like close to 30,000 when they play P5 schools.

So what? That goes for any G5 team in Texas playing a regional P5.

Rice drew 42,000 vs Texas in 2019.

They played in the Texans Stadium and 35,000 were Texas fans.

And UTSA plays in the Alamodome 20 miles off campus and the majority of fans would be from the P5 Texas school. What’s your point?

(10-11-2021 04:23 PM)Attackcoog Wrote:  

(10-11-2021 03:56 PM)JSchmack Wrote:  There's zero benefit to doing it, ever. For anyone. Because the conferences are TV rights negotiating entities and diversity of region is one of the largest factors in TV negotiations.

You get put on the air, and compensated based on your appeal to as many viewers as possible. So a regional conference limits the number of possible viewers interested in your conference. This is why the Southwest Conference broke up.

"Travel expenses" is a counter-intuitive argument. Everyone seems to think that the further away a school is, the more travel expenses there are; but that's only true if you're taking a taxi or Uber.

There's no mileage structure to plane tickets. The places people go FREQUENTLY are (per mile) cheaper than the places travelers seldomly fly to.

Charlotte to Houston is twice as cheap to fly to as Charlotte to Marshall, because Houston's a huge market with a big airport so every airline is going to have dozens of flights daily into Houston; while going to Marshall, you need specific flights because there's fewer options.

The only significant savings travel wise by realigning conferences more geographically is if you can replace a FLIGHT with a bus trip. Everyone's going to fly if it's a over a 4 hour bus ride; and you're talking about like 48 schools across the country to possibly be in a league in; so there's not a lot of instances where you are going to replace flights with bus trips (outside of Texas, anyway).


And you also have to consider that even if you can add in more bus trips by changing conferences, chances are the nearby schools in different conferences are currently playing each other in NON-CONFERENCE ANYWAY, because it's nice and convenient. And it provides better cost certainty than being in a league together and trying to get games.


If you're App State, being in a different conference as Charlotte means you've got guaranteed home/home series with the Sun Belt teams.... AND IT'S EASY TO GET CHARLOTTE on the schedule because they're close. That's cost-certainty. If they're in a league with Charlotte, now they need to replace them on the OOC schedule and all the choices are further away, and are probably going to be LESS WILLING to do a home & home because it's harder for Texas State to visit Boone.

Look---the plan has merit in some situations. For starters, the TV deals of conferences involved have to almost exactly the same media value so that any horse trading of schools has no real financial repercussions for the respective TV deals. Secondly---it needs to be the best road forward for both conferences.

In this case, the AAC deal is so much higher than the SB or CUSA deal that the AA teams are immediately out of the equation. That leaves just the Sunbelt and CUSA with roughly equal TV deal. Then you see that the Sunbelt schools may have a better route forward than CUSA. That pretty much torpedo's any way forward for this.

This. Everyone not in these conferences thinks this is a great idea. Expand the idea to include the P5 conferences and, all of a sudden, everyone suddenly understands why it doesn't work.

College football seems to be re-aligning into value tiers rather than regions over the past few years. When some groups of teams are worth multiples per year of the others, you have a very obvious situation where everyone would like to be re-grouped with teams from higher tiers than theirs, but none from the lower tiers. Probably the most damning aspect of this proposal is that it's being proposed by the conference now arguably seen as the lowest tier. If the SEC had proposed this, then it would have traction.

The most interesting part of recent alignment moves to me has been that teams have been slowly moving up tier by tier as their values increase, but none of these conferences have had the gumption to kick any teams down a tier. As Houston/UCF/Cincinnati move up to the Big 12 and Texas/OU move up to the SEC, it makes sense that teams like South Carolina, Missouri, Vanderbilt, Wake Forest, Georgia Tech, Syracuse, UNC, West Virginia, ECU, Kansas State, Illinois, Akron, San Jose, UNLV, New Mexico, Hawaii, UL-Monroe, etc would move down a tier.