(06-17-2022 04:41 PM)Frank the Tank Wrote:  

(06-17-2022 04:22 PM)bullet 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:  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.

Frank you are 100% wrong. I'm disappointed in you. Lots of people post that fake information, but I thought you were better than that.

Facts:

Texas decides to stay in the Big 12 June 14, 2010.
Reasons are that Fox and ESPN didn't want the Pac 16 to happen and promised the Big 12 would get comparable money in their new deal to what the Pac 16 would get. In the press conference on that day President Powers said they figured they would get similar money and similar schedules and could stay in the Big 12.

LHN deal up until late October 2010 was expected to yield only about $3 million and Fox was expected to get it. ESPN made their big bid October 25, 2010, 4 months after the Pac 16 deal fell apart.

The money on the LHN deal had absolutely zero to do with the Pac 16 deal falling apart.

There are a lot of claims that having a LHN was what caused UT to make the decision it did. President Powers and Deloss Dodds never mentioned it in that press conference. And the claim makes no sense. The Pac has their 2 team subnetworks. Texas originally proposed to Texas A&M to do a 2 team network. So Texas would have the exposure in either place. And as I pointed out above, the money was expected to be minor.

I don't believe that it's fake information at all. I understand you appear to be presenting the UT view on the situation, which is fine. However, there have been several reports over the years that stated directly that the LHN was the poison pill to the Pac-16 negotiations. Make no mistake about this: the Pac-16 was a DONE deal. As in Larry Scott visited multiple Big 12 campuses directly and got the actual paperwork signed being a DONE deal. Texas, truly at the last minute, stated that it didn't want to participate in a conference network with the Pac-16. This was obviously a huge issue for the then-Pac-10. While the LHN contract may not have been finalized for a few months, we can't pretend that Texas suddenly saying that it didn't want to be a part of a conference network and the announcement of the formation of the LHN happened at the exact same time that the Pac-16 proposal fell apart wasn't the primary reason for the Pac-16 proposal falling apart.

Like I've said, other schools *signed* the Pac-16 paperwork. You can go back to Larry Scott's plane records and it shows that he arrived at those places during the applicable days in question. That's not fake. The last stop was Austin, which is when UT killed the entire deal.

I don't blame UT for doing it. The school was (and still is) the single most valuable school in conference realignment, so they had the leverage to get whatever they wanted to make them happy. The school trying to argue that the LHN deal wasn't technically finalized until October 2010 is totally disingenuous for the school's reasoning, though: the LHN formation news absolutely came out at the exact same time that the Pac-16 deal fell apart.

To be sure, I sort of agree with you that UT didn't stay in the Big 12 for the LHN *money* itself. I don't think it was about the money so much as it was about being the only school that could get its very own network from ESPN. The platform in and of itself was what was special to UT beyond the money.

I've read those reports that came out years later. But those reports sound like Pac 12 trying to make themselves look better. Just like you got all kinds of conflicting reports between OU and the Pac 12 when that fell apart a year later, both claiming they were the ones that pulled the plug.

Those reports don't pass the smell test.
1. Money wasn't significant.
2. Exposure was essentially the same with the Pac 2 school subnetworks.
3. Everyone thought Fox was going to get the deal until that October 25 bid by ESPN.
4. Texas didn't say a word about it in the press conference or any time since then.

Contemporaneous public reports by the people making the decision are vastly more credible than stuff coming out from "reliable sources" years later. Powers and Dodds were too exhausted in that press conference to be making things up. Powers talked about how they worked out scheduling to minimize travel. And then when they looked at those schedules and the money Fox and ESPN promised the Big 12, they realized they could get essentially the same schedules for the same dollars and not leave the conference.

You can't have watched that press conference with Powers, Dodds and Plonsky and believe that the LHN was any significant factor.