(07-04-2020 11:59 AM)Hokie Mark Wrote:  

(07-03-2020 03:40 PM)JRsec Wrote:  

(07-03-2020 02:56 PM)Hokie Mark Wrote:  I'd love to see one big conference with central scheduling for every power team, with all of them playing 6 home/6 away games to bring in some of these huge differences in SoS.

Oh, and while we're at it, let's do away with the bowls and expand the playoffs.

Just having one big conference doesn't help all that much. Having one big conference (league) that the schools controlled would if:
1. We put a couple of satellites into space via SpaceX (think 6 to 7 billion).
2. We built an satellite uplink facility or purchased one.
3. We bundled the product of all 65 P5 schools, kept current conference affiliations (in name only) and sold a streaming package for each of the P5 conferences for $250 total ($50 a month from September through January) and owned the proceeds. Since the combined viewership of each conference is just over 100 million let's assume that not having network exposure initially costs us 30 million subscribers combined. So hypothetically we have 70 million viewers paying the new entity $50 a month for 5 months for football. That equals 17.5 billion in straight revenue divided by 65 schools which comes to 269.23 million per school. And that's just for football. If basketball is worth 20% of that and if we are a breakaway and have our own tournament that will be 53.846 million more per school without the tournament for those who subscribe to college basketball season as well. The tournament is worth 1.2 billion to ESPN so lets say it is worth 1 billion to the upper tier. That's another 15,384,000 per school.

I could add baseball/softball subscriptions plus the associated World Series for each and add Hockey for the Big 10 schools but that's just a nice cherry on top of the other pile of cash.

The total for owning and managing our own rights would be 338.25 million per school.

And Mark we haven't even touched advertising which would nearly double that amount so call it $600 million per school in annual revenue. If the schools gave $100 million each from their first year's revenue they could pay for the two satellites. (6.5 billion)

Our presidents and commissioners need to get their heads out of their butts! The window for getting this done before the networks lobby Congress to close the window is short. But if every school gave 25 million a year for governance once they have paid the 100 million for the satellite overhead (pun intended) they would be looking at 575 million per year for all sports rights thereafter including the conference support revenue.

Obviously our schools don't need 575 million a year to fund athletics. We could cap that at a handsome 200 million per year and use the other 375 million for funding our own research and campus needs. Sports could become a revenue stream for academics.

What's more by establishing our own streaming capacities each school has an efficient means for offering online coursework and billing it by subscription.

In normal times all classes for general studies (Freshman and Sophomore years) could be held online with unrestricted enrollment which also enhances University revenue. Undergraduate courses for honors scholarship students (Freshman-Senior Class) would still be held on campus as would all Junior and Senior minor and major work. Only the top students from the first two years would get to enroll as Juniors and those class sizes would be limited. Those who don't make the cut will have coursework guaranteed by their states to transfer completely to any other state school so no money wasted.

The benefit to parents is that the cost of the first two years is cut in half or more by no need for campus housing and board. The benefit to the schools is more campus space for graduate work and research and a proven means of obtaining the best students for their Junior and Senior classes. The benefit to the state school system is you have oodles more qualified students to swell your Junior and Senior class groups who are encouraged to stay in state by the guaranteed transfer of work. This tide lifts all boats.

But none of this is possible if we continue to let the networks dictate what we are worth. When ESPN pays out 50% of the profit that is after their executives are paid and their talking heads are paid and they bill us for any other potential expense and it is not 50% of the advertising revenue.

If Sankey has signed the new deal with ESPN then he has lazily signed away a possible 500 million per school. Presidents lazily do this as well because they don't want any extra work. But for the massive potential they are all fools for settling for the scraps from ESPN's table.

We the schools have no added overhead for executive management. We the schools have no need of talking heads who don't even get our names right. We have our own play by play crews that our fans love.

And we have already all built production facilities in order to uplink signals from our schools for the conference networks and they belong to us.

The only thing preventing this future is the will to go there.

And what does the consumer get for this cost during football season? The ability to watch any of his conference games live or any of them recorded at any time. For the extra 50 bucks he gets to watch any conference's game live and watch any or all of them recorded. That's a deal worth roughly half of the cost of one season ticket book to SEC or Big 10 games.

And Mark even if hidden or routine overhead costs each school another 100 million each 475 million is a helluva lot more than the drippings we get now.

So you're saying the P5 schools could make more money by cutting out the middle man? Yeah, baby!

Around 9 times more in media money alone. But we would have to also own our own basketball tournament, baseball tournament and softball tournament, and then we would make phenomenally more!