The most effective business available to a marketer is one that doesn’t appear to the consumer to even be a business. One that looks not like a product at all but rather some sort of benefaction.
I remember when I was a kid thinking that television was like a public utility, a civic service provided for the common good. It never occurred to me what commercials were or who spent the money to make them, who profited from them or why. TV was just there. Like it was produced just for me.
That’s the way a lot of fans see college football. It’s an escape from their workaday world. They don’t know how the sausage is made and don’t care to know.
Which is fine until something like Texas’ and Oklahoma’s imminent emigration from the Big 12 to the Southeastern Conference occurs. Then the ingredients need to be explained.
The broad assumption from fans and a lot of other folks is that, because the SEC expands to 16, everyone else will pick off the Big 12′s remaining members, it will cease to exist, and we’ll have only four major conferences instead of five.
It’s here that fans see geography and not economics, as if college football would automatically execute an expansion plan as if it was made for their viewing pleasure:
The ACC would take West Virginia which borders on Virginia. The Big Ten would take Iowa State and Kansas which borders on Nebraska. The Pac-12 would take maybe Kansas State and Oklahoma State which border on Colorado. Then, I guess Texas Christian, Baylor and Texas Tech are supposed to fold into the AAC. Or something. And we’ll have a Power Four.
I don’t think anything like that is happening, for several reasons.
Realize first, that Texas and Oklahoma are not garden-variety expansion targets. They are both annually among the top 10 richest football programs in the nation, as documented by the Equity in Athletics Data Analysis posted each spring.
According to the EADA for the 2019-20 fiscal year, Texas is far and away the #1 revenue earner in college football ($144 million gross; $105 million profit) while Oklahoma is #6 ($102 million gross; $60 million profit).
Further, nobody else in the Big 12 is remotely in that ballpark. The closest are #27 TCU ($61 million gross; $20 million profit) and #30 Baylor ($57 million gross; $21 million profit).
Naturally, Big Ten fans are wondering which schools their conference might pluck off the Big 12 carcass, or how else it might respond.
My answer: I don’t see any remainders from the Big 12 that are attractive enough. And in case you’re holding out hope for Notre Dame, I’d say forget it. If UND had any intention of joining a conference in full membership, it would have done so already. And the ACC would have been its preference, anyway. This changes nothing for the Irish.
Many fans never grasped why Rutgers and Maryland were invited to the B1G. And from a football competition standpoint, it’s a valid question. But it was never really about that.
The key was increasing the Big Ten Network’s viewership on basic cable tiers, and on all manner of devices through video streaming, across the heavily populated Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. If B1G football was merely exposed to so many more viewers in that broad new footprint, even if the local teams sucked for a while, that was substantial growth potential. And if the Knights and Terrapins ever began to win, it could be major.
You really can’t say the same about the geoeconomics of Kansas or western Iowa. Comparatively, KU and Iowa State account for a tiny sliver of potential new viewership among a relatively sparse population that’s bordered by much larger and more fervid fan bases (namely Iowa, Nebraska and Oklahoma). So, while #35 Iowa State ($52 million gross; $23 million profit) and #51 Kansas ($41 million gross; $19 million profit) have actually been slightly more lucrative than #45 Maryland ($45 million gross; $23 million profit) and #61 Rutgers ($33 million gross; deficit net), the potential just isn’t there, either in screens or fan base.
It doesn’t matter much that Matt Campbell has been running a highly competitive football operation at ISU or that Bill Self’s KU basketball program is commonly nationally ranked. The profit margin simply isn’t there.
Just as an example of how much more important football is compared to basketball on a major university athletic department’s bottom line: the Jayhawks’ sad-sack football program cleared more than three times the profit ($18.6 million) of the powerful men’s basketball program ($5.5 million) in fiscal 2019-20.
So, economically, there’s just no reason to bring in either Kansas or Iowa State – or West Virginia or Oklahoma State or anyone else from the Big 12. Culturally and academically, none are Big Ten fits. Fiscally, none begins to pull its weight, now or ever.
Which is ostensibly why Texas and Oklahoma want out of their Big 12 prairie pen to run with the big dogs of the SEC. And not much else remains on the other side of that swinging B12 gate.
What’s more likely to happen then? I just don’t see a rush by any of the other conferences to absorb the remaining Big 12 schools. Rather, I think the conference will limp along by poaching some of the more attractive AAC programs they examined a few years back, the prime candidates being Cincinnati, Memphis, Central Florida and Houston.
Will the resultant league still be considered a major conference? I don’t know. But if the proposed 12-team College Football Playoff model is adopted, I’m not sure how much that matters. There will be an opening for Big 12 teams to be involved.
The league’s next broadcast contract with one or some combination of the major networks simply won’t be as lucrative. So, while the rich grow richer, the middle class Big 12 will fall farther behind.
I don’t see how any of it is good for the game. It just is.
More PennLive sports coverage:
• A fond farewell to hoops, celebrating NBA’s joyous new Age of Giannis as we slide into football mode.
• Which Power Five college football programs do the most with a buck and which do the least?
• Will USA basketball team win gold in Tokyo? Amid globalized game, does it really matter anymore?
The Link LonkJuly 23, 2021 at 04:33PM
https://www.pennlive.com/pennstatefootball/2021/07/hard-to-imagine-how-big-ten-would-follow-secs-addition-of-texas-oklahoma-in-expansion-to-16-jones.html
Hard to imagine how Big Ten would follow SEC’s addition of Texas, Oklahoma in expansion to 16 | Jones - PennLive
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