RE: Sports media expert Joel Lulla "AAC contract a little misleading"
The figure is reasonable, and typical of many (not all) ESPN contracts.
The MAC which supposedly gets a little of $1.1M from ESPN is also on the hook for production costs, and for a much smaller number of events pays around $900K back to ESPN for production cost. (CUSA in their press release about their $200-300K per school CBS contract made a sarcastic reference to the SBC and MAC contracts, noting that other conferences give higher figures, but do not mention that they return 90% of the money to ESPN for production costs).
The other misleading aspect of the AAC contract is the escalator. While the final year of the contract (2030-31) will be paying out over $7.5M per school, they actual first year payout will be under $5.5M per school. Then factor in production costs. The $7M figure is an average (which will be reached after the 7th year on the escalator), which is also a bit high (about 10% high), since it does not factor in the AAC HQ share (this is true of all press reports for all conferences, as reporters rarely factor in the conference HQ share).
It's still an extremely good G5 contract, but it may only net schools, after production costs, $3.5M in 2020-21, and for a Football only school under $3M. That doesn't seem like enough of a net to draw anyone in the West away, when contrasted to a $50-60M budget for Athletics, and taking in $1-2M net on the MWC contract (MWC contract is unbalanced, successful programs get far more), especially when considering the cost for moving Olympics (Basketball) into a low end one bid conference, and the impact that would have on gate, donations, loss of NCAA credits/payments and recruiting. (C-USA/MAC/SBC are a one bid conferences, and a school would be Football and Basketball invite to the AAC, a clear $3.3M jump immediately and growing, with no downside ... except that all but Rice and ODU would be faced with needing to spend $10M/year more to compete in the AAC)
UConn may actually be ahead since I am pretty sure FOX pays the Big East production costs. Any football earnings would thus be a net increase over the AAC for them.
I do think think this does put in better perspective the actual level of money, and focuses the gap to P5 all the more, since ESPN pays the production cost of the LHN and SEC, while the ACC schools are paying a couple $million each on production (P12 takes that out of distributions from P12N, and they are more inefficient than ESPN or FOX for SEC and B1G respectively).
Back to the AAC: 1) Uconn's move looks even more financially sensible; 2) the AAC package looks even more insufficient to draw a football only MWC school. We are back where we started. The AAC is better off than it was, but it's not the game changer some of the supporters expected.
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