Conference Expansion

If the acc could pay the 70 mil that the big is, they would stay with their crappy schedule and easy path. It’s only the money.

 

ACC expansion: Florida State, Clemson among four schools opposed to adding Stanford, Cal

 

what?

 

It would be dumb to add those two schools which would contribute next to nothing to the per team TV pot and cause existing schools to have add'l travel costs for cross country. I understand that ND was pushing this. The ACC should tell ND that they will take those schools on one condition only and that ND must join in Football too sharing TV revenue equally with the rest of the league. That is the only thing that would move the needle on TV revenue and make adding those 2 west coast schools worth it. That Stanford is great in minor sports is meaningless...if they can't bring Football TV revenue, they are no better than adding a team like Wyoming, etc.

 

MSN

"Those potential newcomers hail from the ACC, who currently fears attrition from its top football brands. Spurrier, surprisingly, doesn’t see an issue with bringing on former rivals Clemson and FSU"
Here’s what he had to say on Mike Bianchi’s Open Mike podcast.


“Yea, if they come into the SEC, heck, that would be good, I think. And maybe bring Miami or Clemson, I guess would be the other one that would be a possibility.”

 

I had not heard this. If true it was surely short-sighted, greedy and dumb.



PS -- Links to an in-depth behind-the-scenes story. I haven't read it all yet.

 

Messy.

 

Conference kinda imploded and I’m not sure there was much they could do about it. The main key in hindsight was to probably keep your biggest assets USC and UCLA happy. Funny how we all thought the Big XII was going to collapse when Texas and OU bolted. They reacted quickly and kept everyone together and looks to be much stronger today with those PAC defections.

 

https://www.si.com/college/2023/08/...e-spurrier-supports-florida-state-joining-sec

 

The ESPN offering $30 million for all of the PAC inventory is true. So is the counter from the PAC for $50 million. The PAC should've countered $32 million and the PAC gets to keep the PAC12 Network and a T2 game of the week. ESPN would've at least listened, and the Network could've been shopped to Amazon, Apple or YouTube. Maybe the PAC gets an additional $5 million from the streaming service?

The BIG12 was on its death bed, and the PAC was going to take 4 teams. The move was blocked by USC, who was already in discussions with the B1G.

The PAC made mistake after mistake the last decade. Nobody is that surprised the PAC is the league that didn't survive. Too bad too. It was fun while it lasted.

 

I know some of y’all don’t like her, but she brings quality content to me…

 

Good article. What the PAC wacks should have done is go on a couple of road trips in the Fall to the football crazy South or Midwest to see the difference in the passion of the average resident of those areas. The West Coast just cannot compare. When you go into a Sports bar in the middle of the afternoon in the Bay area and have to ask them to switch the TV from the Price is Right to a College football game, that tells you pretty much all you need to know about where College Football stacks up in Cali.

If those execs would have done that they may have realized their true worth and accepted the best offer they could get they might still exist.

 

Once the SEC took Okie and UTex, however, there weren't any real options left to the remainder of those schools. Until they added the PAC schools, the Big XII additions didn't really move the revenue needle at all.

 

The Big XII, Pac-12 and ACC all had something in common leading up to the current round of realignment: 2-3 programs whose value dwarfed what they were getting from the conference (OU/Tex, USC/Oregon, FSU/Clemson). As the SEC and B1G pulled away in revenues, it was only a matter of time until those cash cow programs looked for a better deal that their current conferences couldn't provide anymore.

The Big XII I think benefitted from having to act first; they got to make the first reactionary move, pulled in a few more programs with the same expectations as their remaining members which allowed them to secure a reasonable deal everyone would be happy with, giving them stability. The ACC will probably break up because they still have a significant imbalance today; FSU and Clemson are much more valuable than the rest right now, then there's several other programs with an inflated sense of their worth (Miami, UNC, NC St, UVA, VT).

 

I will never want FSU in the SEC. It makes my blood boil just thinking about it. Never, never, never.

 

I was surprised. I always though the Big-12 would be the first to fold when Texas and OU left.

In my opinion, the biggest mistake by the Pac-12 goes back to around 2010 when the Big-12 previously looked like it was the conference that was about to implode. At that time, there were serious discussions about the Pac-12 taking Texas, OU, Oklahoma State and Texas Tech. The deal ultimately fell apart because Texas wasn't going to share LHN revenue. But as I recall, the Pac-12 passed on taking the other 3, even though OU begged to move.

But the problem for the Pac-12 was that there were ZERO viable Pac-12 expansion candidates West of the Mississippi River. And having all your high profile teams on PST makes it difficult to negotiate a strong TV deal.

I totally understand why they said no to Texas and the LHN, but had they taken at least OU, Texas Tech, OSU and maybe Kansas for basketball or another Texas school, The Pac-12 would have made itself stronger as a conference and by adding 4 CST teams, added earlier game time starts, which would have helped them in their TV negotiations. Plus, they'd have killed the Big-12.

The Pac-12 wouldn't have never rivaled The Big-10 or SEC, but it would have been on par with the ACC and I always envisioned that the Pac-12 and ACC could maybe find a way down the road to informally "merge" in such a way that they could operate somewhat independently as an East and West division, but maybe compete as a third superconference.

Instead, at least in my opinion, the Pac-12 pretty much sealed their own fate. Having turned down Texas and OU, they had no viable route to expand (other than take smaller schools like SDSU), a TV footprint that effectively limited their potential TV revenue to mostly late night games, and they let the Big-12 stick around. And they ultimately made the Big-12 even stronger by allowing them to expand with 4 teams into the mountain time zone.

 

@atlantagator86 The PAC-12 did add two schools in the MDT in Utah and Colorado the last go 'round. I guess you're saying they should've added more.

 

Not exactly. There's a lot more value in TV for CST than MST. That was really my point.

47.6% of the US population is EST and 29.1% is CST. That means almost 80% of the entire TV audience is EST or CST. Only 6.7% is MST and 16.6% is PST. The point being that there is really a relatively low value in the MST. MST, for all intents and purposes, is an extension of PST.

TV game slots for prime games are typically noon, 3:30pm, 7/7:30 pm and 10/10:30pm EST. So the Pac-12 is not represented at all in the noon slot. They split regional coverage with the ACC on ABC going up against the top SEC and Big-10 national games in the 3:30 slot. There's also a lot of competition against big SEC/Big-10 games at the 7pm slot.

The only TV spot where the Pac-12 has/had any sort of negotiating leverage was that 10/10:30pm EST, but those 80% of the viewers in the EST and CST are probably in bed by halftime.

I'm not saying there's no value in MST, but had the Pac-12 pushed more for a handful of prominent schools in CST, there probably would have been a significantly larger TV audience in the CST and they probably could have offered game inventory at the noon EST slot for the games played in CST stadiums. They would have had more leverage in those negotiations.

They still wouldn't have gotten the $50M the Pac-12 thought they deserved, but they probably would have gotten a TV deal before the Big-12.

The Big-12 offered a more competitive TV product to sell with the majority of their teams in the EST and CST. What I'll be curious to see moving forward is if the Big-12, now having 5 MST teams with the recent additions, can get additional revenues for late games. I would think the Pac-12 late night TV spot on ESPN would now go to the Big-12.