(07-09-2019 11:01 AM)Wedge Wrote:  

(07-09-2019 09:20 AM)b0ndsj0ns Wrote:  

(07-09-2019 09:10 AM)UTEPDallas Wrote:  

(07-09-2019 08:53 AM)NBPirate Wrote:  The AAC doesn't need a rust belt school

It’s not what you want. It’s what ESPN wants. The AAC will add what ESPN tells them to add. Just ask the ACC.

They will, but does ESPN want to go from paying for every bit of Buffalo's content at the MAC price to paying the AAC price for it? Buffalo probably makes as much if not the most sense of any likely yes candidates, except for the fact that ESPN already owns 100% of their content for very little. What does ESPN gain by changing the patches on their jersey and paying multiple millions more a year to do it? Everyone keeps taking the statement of "there's a very short list of teams the AAC will add" as saying that's fully the AAC's decision. What I suspect is the actual truth is there's a very short list of teams that ESPN feel is worth the AAC adding.

Conferences have made moves like this in the past, and ESPN has approved despite the monetary point you mentioned.

Not saying that Buffalo is "the one", but you could have just as easily said the following a few years ago:

"They will, but does ESPN want to go from paying for every bit of Buffalo's Louisville's content at the MAC AAC price to paying the AAC ACC price for it? Buffalo Louisville probably makes as much if not the most sense of any likely yes candidates, except for the fact that ESPN already owns 100% of their content for very little. What does ESPN gain by changing the patches on their jersey and paying multiple millions more a year to do it?"

That is true, but that one also provided them the benefit of crippling a league who's TV deal was expiring and was hoping to get a brand new deal on the open market. Taking Louisville (along with the rest of the Big East defections to the ACC) did make them have to pay more for Louisville, but they also valued Louisville very highly and allowed them to be able to pay the remainder of the Big East/new AAC essentially nothing. So I'd say financially paying Louisville $25 million a year (or whatever the exact number was just guessing) but getting the entire AAC for like $25 million a year was probably on the whole a financial savings for them as well as prevented them from potentially losing content they valued to another network. They own the MAC and the AAC for I believe all of the 2020's (or at least close I don't know the exact end date of the MAC's deal). The content isn't going anywhere unlike the Big East/American that wanted to shop on the open market. What would be a comparable situation to moving Louisville to the ACC would be if ESPN facilitated a move of a MWC team to the AAC. The MWC deal is expiring and there's some grumblings they want to leave ESPN. If they wanted to make it worth it to the AAC to take whatever properties they value from the MWC that would follow the playbook perfectly. The Buffalo to the AAC situation is much more like the everyone whoring themselves to the B12 a while back. ESPN could have made it worth it to the B12 to add teams, but they owned all the properties that would say yes for pennies on the dollar and instead just figured out a way to get the B12 to stay where they were.