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Poll: How many SEC teams will there be in 2030? (YOU MAY VOTE FOR MORE THAN ONE OPTION)
There will be 16 SEC members (no change)
SEC will have 17 members
SEC will have 18 members
SEC will have 19 members
SEC will have 20 members
The SEC won't raid any conference.
SEC will raid the ACC
SEC will raid the Big Ten
SEC will raid the Big 12
SEC will raid the PAC 12
SEC will raid the G5
The SEC will merge with another conference.
There will be a P2, not a P5
Something else will happen.
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Will the SEC stop at 16 or expand to 18 or 20?
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Frank the Tank Online
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RE: Will the SEC stop at 16 or expand to 18 or 20?
(06-17-2022 02:54 PM)JRsec Wrote:  
(06-17-2022 02:39 PM)Frank the Tank Wrote:  
(06-17-2022 02:23 PM)JRsec Wrote:  
(06-17-2022 02:14 PM)Frank the Tank Wrote:  
(06-17-2022 01:24 PM)JRsec Wrote:  Oh, but there are other reasons besides money. They both likely desire to remain competitively viable in their sport of notoriety. Money is involved in that but the motivation is to keep their brand power at or near the top of their respective sports.

And unless you are in the board room there is no way to know the actual motives of the networks. Exposure, association with a brand, a defensive move to deny a rival a key acquisition, or any number of extraneous reasons could be involved, and have been. Why the LHN? It wasn't a smart money play. ESPN wanted that brand association and dominance in that market. Now they have it. They chose to lose now in order to control a move later.

It's not just a money analysis, whether in theory or in practice. Where is UNC & Duke worth more? Where can FSU and Clemson be worth more to ESPN? What is essential to keep? It all comes into play and then some, as with the LHN.

Actually, the LHN was very much a smart money play when looking at ESPN's expenditures in totality. It goes to the first part of your bolded paragraph: a defensive move to deny a rival a key acquisition.

The importance of the LHN was what it *prevented* from happening: the Pac-16. That would have created a third monster monolith superconference after the SEC and Big Ten that would have driven up the college football TV market rights fees even further than what we see now.

The thing is that we can look at it from the flip side for ESPN: you're looking at it as if though they *want* to have schools like UNC, Duke, FSU and Clemson be where they would be worth more. That's not how they looked at the Pac-16. Instead, I think it's more in ESPN's interest to have UNC, Duke, FSU and Clemson exactly where they are now at a discount price. The FSU-Clemson football and UNC-Duke basketball games are still on ESPN and they're paying a fraction of the price compared to what they'd be paying if those were Big Ten or SEC games.

Sure, ESPN would always like better SEC games. The distinction is that they're not in the business of unilaterally paying *more* for those SEC games. (Hence the hemming and hawing over whether the SEC will have 8 or 9 conference games going forward since ESPN isn't willing to pay for the additional conference games). ESPN still looks at things in totality: are those newly-minted Clemson-Alabama games worth it if it means having to increase the SEC rights deal by much more than what it might be saving on the ACC rights deal? That's where I'm skeptical.

ESPN isn't a charity - it will ALWAYS want to pay lower rights fees. Now, they may not be *able* to pay lower rights fees because the market dictates otherwise. However, this notion that ESPN will just start trading SEC and ACC schools because they're both under contract there has a lot of faulty reasoning to me. They have the ACC locked into a super cheap contract for the next decade and a half: why the heck they would want to move any of the top ACC brands out of that super cheap contract makes very little sense. It's in ESPN's interests to ensure that the top ACC brands don't go *anywhere* (even to a fellow SEC contract).

Ah, but that utilizes their value once a year in football and twice, maybe 3 times in hoops. Would they not be worth much more vs Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Georgia, Auburn, Tennessee, A&M, or in the case of hoops against most of the same, and Kentucky? Big UNC, Duke, Clemson, and FSU games weekly yields a much higher valued total inventory which could be worth much more than the 140 million in payout difference for the moves. And having multiple platforms means there is ample use for such an inventory.

I grant that it's possible. Similarly, though, it could be that it's simply not worth more to ESPN if they're not yielding savings on the ACC contract to compensate to whatever more they would have to pay to the SEC.

That's what ESPN feared back in 2010 when they offered the LHN: it was better to send $15 million per year to Texas than deal with a Pac-16 that included Texas and would have as much negotiating power as any sports entity outside of the NFL and would have cost much, much more.

Note that you've pointed out another reason why the UT/OU expansion is so singularly efficient for the SEC in a way that isn't really possible for many (or any) expansion combinations. Not only are Texas and Oklahoma top tier football brands, but they're also top tier basketball brands, too. They're achieving in an expansion with just 2 schools what it would take all 4 of Clemson, FSU, UNC and Duke to do here... and that's with the bar to actually make expansion more profitable to the SEC going sky high with this UT/OU move in the first place.

In any event, my point is that thinking that the SEC and Big Ten can really add anyone besides Notre Dame to make more on a media money basis is pretty much impossible now.

If we want to say that there are global factors like a total restructuring of college football administration or the elimination of the NCAA that could spur those leagues to expand further, then sure, I can buy that. I just don't think it's going to be based on how much more money ESPN, FOX or anyone else is going to pay at this point. We've reached the maximum per school revenue size for the Big Ten and SEC under the current environment just as the NFL has reached its maximum per franchise size. The NFL reached the point where their current members would make more money by staying the same size as opposed to expanding and that's simply where I see the Big Ten and SEC now.

I suspect the SEC might be more interested in North Carolina, Duke, Virginia and Kansas. 4 AAUs, 3 national brands, 3 new states, and oodles of hoops branding (which is insurance for the future). FSU and Clemson could be used by ESPN to anchor a better football conference (rebuilt from B12 and ACC brands). To me the accretive value to the SEC is in hoops (especially if basketball is monetized outside of the NCAA), and yet they would also be picking up 3 stellar baseball programs and an improving one at Kansas. The conference would never run short on any of the Big 3's post seasons. And it adds (as did OU and UT) to softball and women's hoops.

It also puts a bow on the entire region.

We'll simply see what ESPN is thinking soon enough.

Well, I think the Big Ten would be interested in all of those exact same schools in a vacuum, too. This is sort of the opposite of the UT/OU situation, though. It was probably hard envisioning OU ending up in the Big Ten while it was very easy to see them fit into the SEC. UT could really fit into any conference geographically and academically (which is why they were such a valuable commodity for realignment - they made sense for EVERY conference coast-to-coast). In contrast, I just see no way that Duke would ever choose the SEC over the Big Ten and I'd likely say the same for UVA and Kansas. UNC is different in the sense that they're in a more UT-like position. The thing is that UT's rivals preferred the SEC while UNC's rivals very likely prefer the Big Ten.

I think it's all water under the bridge because of the ACC Grant of Rights agreement, though. We can talk about all of these scenarios of the ACC getting poached all day, but from a legal perspective, the GOR is truly a hammer to prevent schools from getting poached. Like I've said before, UT and OU are having a hard time simply paying an extra year or two of damages in order to be released from the Big 12 GOR agreement... and these are super rich schools going to the super rich SEC. It's not reasonable for any ACC school to be paying a dozen years of those same types of damages in order for the ACC to agree to release them from the GOR. (The term of art to "break the GOR" is NOT a very good way of phrasing it for anyone that wants to discuss this issue. It implies that a school can unilaterally figure out a way to break the contract, which simply isn't true. Instead, it's the conference getting enough money that it's satisfied to agree to release the defecting school from its GOR obligations. ALL of the power is with the conference in GOR agreements.)
06-17-2022 04:24 PM
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RE: Will the SEC stop at 16 or expand to 18 or 20? - Frank the Tank - 06-17-2022 04:24 PM



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