(08-18-2021 01:14 PM)Wedge Wrote: To the extent that is a criticism of Mandel's article -- it's correct that Mandel goes too far in speculating the remaining Big 12 average team value might be equal to the average AAC team value. ...
Mandel's article is seriously flawed analysis ... he focuses on the OTA games, but looks at
average ratings rather than
average viewers per school.
His analysis is that the average ratings are quite close. And over the period excluding 2020 (which is an outlier because the Big12 had so many slots open to it which in normal conditions would not have been), the two groups of "only Remaining Eight" and "AAC" got approximately the same number of games selected for OTA.
But that is from an inventory from the R8 of up to 6 games per season from eight schools on the one hand ... assuming a P5 OOC game levels them out to 5 home games out of 10, plus two buy games, minus the home Oklahoma or Texas game ... so an inventory of 48 or fewer games per year ...
... while if the typical AAC school has 6 homes games a year, the AAC had an inventory of 72 games (since we are excluding 2020 as an outlier).
So
his own numbers showed that the R8 are more valuable
on a per school basis than the AAC ... he just stopped analyzing the numbers when it reached the conclusion he was aiming for, rather than the conclusion that the numbers themselves point to.
Also, the filtering out of R8 games with OK/TX means that Mandel's analysis is comparing a central estimate of the AAC value to a deliberately conservative estimate of the R8 value, since the average R8 only selections for OTA were
on top of already showing some of those same schools when they played OK/TX, and while the R8 viewers were not a majority of the viewing audience for those games, they were some of it and were part of the calculation of scheduling those games OTA.
The information to untangle
how conservative the estimate that comes from Mandel's number
is ... which is "roughly 50% more FB value per school" ... that is not likely publicly available. The higher the value the potential telecast partners would place on the R8, the harder it is for four schools from the AAC to match that value, and so the more likely it is that they expand to 10 rather than 12.
But if FB is 80% of the media value of the typical conference and MBB 20%, then at $7m/school in the AAC, that is $5.6m/school for FB and $1.4m/school for basketball, and if the R8 FB is, conservatively, 50% more valuable per school, that is $8.4m/school for FB.
The R8 aren't a "normal" conference if they are a "tweener" for FB and a power conference for basketball, and on the basketball side, I'd say twice the AAC value for basketball is also conservative, so that's $2.8m/school for basketball, for a floor value of $11.2m/school.
On that, $15m/school is not at all implausible ... it just requires more information that we likely wouldn't have available to us ... $25m/school might be optimistic.
Now, the top individual schools in the AAC are worth more than the average school, so if the R8 are worth in the neighborhood of 60%-80% more per school, adding four schools that are also worth 60% more per school than the average of the AAC ought to be straightforward ... that would seem likely to be UC, Houston, Memphis and UCF. Subtract one from that set if BYU wants to join and the Big12 wants to invite them.