(08-08-2019 02:57 PM)Frank the Tank Wrote:  In these types of breakdowns, I feel like the truth is somewhere in the middle: Big East supporters seem to underestimate the drop in football revenue, but AAC supporters seem to underestimate the increase in basketball revenue. UConn isn't going to receive the conference distributions for the CFP and other bowls, which is a significant amount that the Big East-biased OP link glosses over. Those guaranteed annual amounts are almost certainly going to be lower and more variable.

At the same time, though, it drives me up the wall when AAC fans try to compare their new football/basketball TV contract with ESPN to the basketball TV contract with Fox because they're simply not the same. When it comes to basketball revenue, UConn is going to straight up make more money for that particular sport and, on a relative basis, the Big East TV contract for basketball is on par with what the Power Five conferences would assign as the basketball value of their TV contracts.

I keep racking my brain to think of the best analogy, but it's like comparing what's a more valuable housing market. Greenwich, CT has higher median home values than Manhattan, but that doesn't mean that real estate is more valuable in Greenwich per se. That median home in Greenwich is going to be a mansion with a lot of land and space, whereas the median home in Manhattan is a fairly small apartment/condo/co-op with no land at all. Manhattan has a much higher price per square foot, which means that a piece of real estate in that is the size of the median Greenwich home is going to be worth much more in Manhattan. By the same token, a condo in Greenwich is going to be less than the same-sized condo in Manhattan. Yet, Greenwich has a larger inventory of large-sized properties, so that drives the median home price upwards. So, is Greenwich or Manhattan the more valuable real estate market?

In this case, Greenwich = AAC and Manhattan = Big East. The AAC might be getting more overall TV money, but that's also because it's selling additional inventory in the form of football. In contrast, the Big East is getting a significantly higher price for what it's specifically selling (basketball) compared to the AAC.

(I'll grant that this is analogy is one of the weaker ones that I've come up with over the years, but it's hard to get across the concept of where you can have a total bundle package being sold by Company A being priced higher than a competing Company B with the smaller package, but the specific composition of Company B's smaller package is worth more compared to the corresponding sub-component of Company A's larger package. Too many people just look at $X > $Y and then don't break it down to an apples-to-apples comparison.)

As a result, the breakeven point for the UConn athletic department overall doesn't require its football program to replace the entire amount that it would have received from the AAC for football. UConn's basketball revenue is going to be higher just based on the Big East distributions for that sport alone (once again not mixing in the apples-to-oranges comparison of the football/basketball distributions of the AAC), much less any increases from ticket sales and donations at the individual school level. With that in mind, its football program doesn't *have* to make as much as it did in the AAC in order for the UConn athletic department to be better off.

A few uc fans tried arguing with me that their media deal is much better than ours and it’s dumbfounding. There’s just no way to refute the strength of that delusion. I’m not sure if they really believe it and just don’t understand how much more money is budgeted for football or they just don’t want to give me the win as a xavier fan