(04-26-2011 03:04 PM)cuseroc Wrote: That is some very interesting news Matt. For those here who disagree that your school should sign such an agreement, your school may not have any choice if they want to recieve a big tv deal. The network, whoever that is, has to protect itself and likely will ad specific language to do so, that member schools will have to accept. Its not about just looking out for numero uno. If the network demands a commitment from the member schools to protect their investment, the member schools will have to acquiese.
Did ESPN/CBS demand that of the SEC? Did ESPN demand it from the ACC? If so, it seems to be a deep secret. I wonder why they didn't?
Quote:Being in the BE involves contracts that details what is expected of each program. Programs should reasonably be able to live up to those expectations. If a school leaves the BE which may cause its tv deals to be reduced
Now you've answered my question: The reason networks do NOT demand huge exit fees, is because they have an easy solution to the problem of teams exiting - they can reduce the rights fees in the TV deal accordingly.
So what's happened here is that your argument has slipped from describing why TV networks would demand large exit fees (to allegedly protect their investment), to describing why a conference would want a large exit fee (to protect the conference, the other member schools, from losses if a given school leaves).
Problem with the latter is that each of these schools wants to do what is best for itself (quite naturally!) and since they generally want to keep their options open, they won't vote for that.
Or to be more specific: the only schools with an interest in voting for a large exit fee are the "runts" of the litter, the schools that bring in less value to the conference. Because in effect, they know that their current conference payout is subsidized by the stronger members, and also because as runts, they aren't going to be head-hunted by other conferences.
E.g., in the Big East of 2004, Miami (a program in demand by another conference) subsidized schools like Uconn (Uconn admitted as much in their lawsuit, in which they said they made big investments in football facilities on the belief that a high-profile program like Miami would be in their conference bringing in the big dollars to pay for it), so Uconn favored policies that would tie Miami to the conference.