(08-08-2023 04:36 PM)JMURocks Wrote:  I reject the notion that ESPN was trying to break the PAC. They offered ballpark $25m/school last year. This is far more than ANY of the other media companies offered, including CBS, Fox, NBC and Apple.

The real issue here is that conference media deals often give every school the same payout, and not all schools carry the same value. Schools like UCLA, USC, Oregon and UW look over at Big 10 money and expect to get that level of payout while the remaining schools in their conference simply weren’t worth that.

The same thing is starting to happen in the ACC. What is causing these splits is the schools no longer want to share equally, and all of them want to get top dollar. It comes down to greed and competition. Oregon and UW walked away from signing the Apple deal when other schools including ASU were ready to do so. ESPN didn’t kill the PAC, a few of the top schools did to better position themselves.

I will agree entirely that uneven payouts (or lack thereof) drive most of this bus. Imagine if you gave B1G or SEC money to one of the departing schools, they’d stay with the higher chance at CFP access in a heartbeat. If you take care of your best, they won’t splinter the conference.

However, in 2022 PAC-12 generated $580 million in revenues, distributing
roughly $37 million per school. ESPN and FOX last week just bought half of the PAC-12 inventory for roughly $192 million in 2024, that’s an absolute steal. Factor in the roughly $130 million total for the USC-UCLA move, ESPN and FOX just got the top 2/3 of the leagues value for ~ $322 million (a little more than half off of this year’s total revenues). That’s a good deal!

Yes most PAC schools aren’t as valuable as a SEC or B1G front runner. However, they just got an absolute steal based on what they were paying this year for the same teams and they get pretty much the same inventory at 45% off between the 8 that leave. They filtered out the garbage that was the remaining 4 four which dragged down the value, allowing them to on average pay each school around what they were making this year but spend way less to essentially own the west coast still. All they had to do was split them into 3 groups.

Say ESPN won all 10 at $25 million a piece. They are overpaying for a lot of unused inventory that doesn’t generate much value for them. You just bought OSU-Cal or ASU-WSU which is not making linear TV. The Big 12 deal which they are partners with Fox on will pay on average $18.33 million a year for a school (taking the assumption ESPN owns 60% of inventory based on Pete Thamel’s reporting) from ESPN’s side. You just added 4 of the remaining 6-7 valuable schools by $7 million less if you were to buy them outright for $25 million on your own. Again, a great deal when FOX and ESPN had tapped out a lot of their resources for B1G and SEC respectively. Killing the PAC was great bargain bin hunting for them.