(01-24-2018 05:10 PM)pesik Wrote: (01-24-2018 03:42 PM)Frank the Tank Wrote: The most valuable school to the AAC TV contract is UConn basketball. As someone noted earlier, the true value of a school is actually shown when they are *down* competitively (as opposed to the peak), and UConn basketball shows that they still have a lot of TV value even when they're not playing well. I honestly believe that whether the AAC receives a materially better TV contract in the future is going to be based more on basketball (where it's considered to be a high major at a minimum and a true power conference at a maximum) as opposed to football (where the G5 label is too big to overcome and networks only assign credit to a particular team performing well for ratings in a particular year as opposed to the conference overall, e.g. UCF this year and Houston last year... but also Boise State in prior years).
The most valuable school from a conference realignment perspective is Cincinnati: solid history in both basketball and football, good TV market, good academics, excellent football recruiting location, and a realistic target for both the Big 12 and ACC in the event that either needs to add and/or replace members. Houston, UCF and USF are the other most likely Big 12 targets (all for different reasons), while UConn is a possible ACC target. (To be sure, I don't think either the Big 12 or ACC are expanding any time soon, if ever, so being a "target" and a dollar is worth a bag of chips as of right now.)
not sure i agree with this
the a10 when they were viewed as elite bball league was paid crumbs
the big east only got paid because they got lucky enough to be negotiating when fs1 was launching and fs1 had no exclusive rights to any conference so they over paid
there is still huge value in our football.. networks get paid off ratings not perceived conference ceilings...and the aac tv viewership is only marginally worse than the lowest p5
even tripling the AAC would still be fraction of the aac
i think there will be football bidders..we are the closest thing to top level football without top level football prices.. i particular think we are the investment opportunity these digital networks or smaller networks thinking about thinking about joining the AAC...there will be bidders to drive the price up
I think a lot of people on this board take the bolded statement as an article of faith ("The Big East got lucky with Fox throwing money around!"), but that's just wishful thinking. And even if that's true, the Big East signed a 12-year deal, so that money advantage will be in place well into the next decade. The fact remains that the Big East makes more TV money off of basketball alone than any of the G5 leagues do for football and conference combined. That TV money is the scoreboard in conference realignment and, frankly, the Big East *crushed* the G5 league on that front considering they don't have the carrying costs of FBS football. The ROI that the Big East is getting off of just basketball is incredibly high (where they're likely getting more on a per capita basis than even the P5 conferences.
Plus, regardless of whether the Fox contract was "lucky" or not, here's the biggest thing that applies in all circumstances: the Big East actually has a *conference* brand. Some people might derisively call it a "Church League" or the "Big Pee" (as one of your resident trolls likes to call it), but even those supposedly derisive names reflect that it's pretty easy for an average sports fan to have an image of what a Big East school looks like even after conference realignment reared its head: basketball-focused, urban, and almost all Catholic schools in the Northeast and Midwest. It's a big city league with its tournament in Madison Square Garden and Average Joe Sports Fan (who is what matters for TV rights) can still identify it.
What's the value of a conference actually having a brand in and of itself? It means that the league gets paid a premium above and beyond just the sum of its parts. You can sell lower level games simply because it has the "Big East brand" in same way the Big Ten and SEC can sell lower level football games because of their respective brands.
Now, is the Big East as good on-the-court as it was prior to conference realignment tearing it apart? Of course not. However, considering everything that happened, the Catholic 7 and its additions rehabilitated the Big East quickly and in a manner where they actually *added* TV revenue after losing schools like Syracuse, Louisville and Notre Dame. Instead of wondering why the Big East was supposedly "lucky", maybe it would be more instructive to evaluate how their leadership found a way to make more money without jumping onto the "Football is everything!" line of thinking that has driven the rest of conference realignment. They figured that if you try to beat the Big Ten and SEC at their game (as the old Big East attempted), you're eventually going to lose... and lose very badly. Instead, the Big East re-built its brand in a different manner and it's finding both financial success AND success on-the-court. (It's funny seeing arguments that the Big East was "lucky" with its current contract and it's supposedly going to get paid less in its next TV contract despite having much greater on-the-court success than anyone could have reasonably anticipated, yet the AAC is going to get a big payday because of its on-the-field/court successes. Now, the AAC could very well get paid more in its next contract, but the simultaneous discounting of the value of the Big East is totally disingenuous.)
The AAC's primary challenge is that there simply isn't a conference brand. Now, there are good programs - UConn basketball (at least historically), UCF and Houston football, etc. However, that's much different than the *conference* having a brand. Does Average Joe Sports fan know the AAC, the American or really have any real image of its members? What is binding these schools together other than it might be the "best of the rest" conference outside of the P5? That is going to be a constant issue because the AAC wasn't ever built on the notion of having an institutionally and/or geographically-aligned conference - it really was constructed to be a "best of the rest" league. To be sure, that's not the fault of the AAC because it had to work with the school options that it had during a time where schools were jumping all over the place. At the same time, you could probably say the same thing about all of the G5 leagues (although the MWC and MAC at least have some geographic alignment). Regardless, that's simply not an actual brand, which means that the AAC (and frankly every other G5 league) can only hope to get paid the sum of its parts (and may actually end up getting paid less than the sum of its parts, as it arguably is today). There's just no premium attached to the conference brand itself.
The other challenge for the AAC is that if it ever does have any school(s) that are deemed to be P5-worthy, one of the P5 leagues (likely the Big 12) will almost certainly poach such school(s) as opposed to ever allowing for the AAC as a whole to be elevated in status. Heck - that happened to the old Big East even when it *was* a BCS AQ conference within the power structure and the money difference wasn't that great between that league and its competitors (at least when the Big East still had Miami). Consolidation of the power leagues is a much more likely scenario than an expansion of more power leagues, so that's the reality that the AAC is facing right now.