https://www.si.com/college/2020/12/10/sec-espn-abc-tv-contract-leaving-cbs
Though terms were not disclosed, ESPN's annual fee is expected to be in the low $300 million range, according to Sports Business Journal, a considerable and expected increase from the $55 million per year that the conference receives from CBS—a bargain deal that was struck in 1996. CBS pulled out of negotiations this spring after the price tag got too high, SBJ reported.
Compare this to the ACC where the total conference revenue in 2018 was about 460 million. This might be a problem.
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So nearly $21.5mil per department. Oh my word. That's a solid down payment on a new football stadium.
Imagine how many bag men you could get with that kinda loot!
I don't understand your hysteria here. "Low $300 million range" sounds like less than $25 million per school. As for the ACC, I can't find any definitive statements on the matter, but Notre Dame's NBC deal is worth $15m per year, and with the ACC's temporary deal to share TV revenue evenly this season they're somehow making about $2m more than that this season, meaning that ESPN is paying the ACC at least $17m per school just for football, in addition to however much they're paying for basketball and olympic sports (which ND was already collecting as full-minus-football members), which I would assume at least bring the total close to $20m per school if not more.
It's no secret that the SEC attracts significantly more eyeballs than the ACC, so if anything I'm shocked that this deal isn't worth even more.
It's only for partial media rights. Their current deal with CBS is only 55 million a year. Yea this is significant. The SEC has a partial media rights deal that pays over half what the TOTAL revenue for the ACC is. The SEC already pays out 44.6 million to each school per year (still trailing Big Ten).
Yeah this is basically 20mil per year FOR 1 EXTRA GAME A WEEK
And it is going to squeeze more ACC games off ABC in the 330 and night slots.
Ya know what? I missed the CBS Big East game. That's how I got into VT when my older brother went to Tech. Don't be surprised if CBS gets involved with ACC....
... Okay, seriously it's a pipe dream. More than likely, B1G replaces that spot.
I will be surprised if CBS gets involved with the ACC, considering that ESPN has those rights on lockdown until at least 2036.
So this contract is entirely separate from the contract the SEC already had with ESPN? In that case, yes, it's pretty ridiculous, and in the wake of the massive layoffs over the last 2-3 years (not just because of COVID) I fail to understand how anybody thought it was a good idea to sign off on it.
ESPN: lays off employees because they overpay for TV deals
Also ESPN when contract negotiations are up:
I think we discussed this before when it was rumored to be happening. One of the theories is that a company is willing to pay more for a small piece of something if it's the last thing they need. So while the cost for this particular piece might seem high, they're probably looking at the entire deal.
It's similar to Disney hypothetically trying to get the Spider-Man movie rights back, so they can have all of the Marvel characters under one roof. If you look at it from the perspective of the money they spend just to buy back one franchise, they're probably overpaying. But part of that price is the ability to control their entire library.
I think it's a little different... The SEC game of the week is pretty inelastic. If you're an SEC fan (and trust me, there are people who aren't fans of a specific team, they're just a fan of the SEC), then ESPN is now a must have service. When the game was on CBS, you could get it for free over antenna. Now, if you want to watch this game, you need cable. I expect this will result in a small bump in cable/ESPN subscribers.
You're getting ESPN the company mixed up with ESPN the channel.
ESPN the company already has all of the SEC rights except for the ability to broadcast games on an over-the-air channel (ABC in their case). Now they get those rights. Which not only gives them the 3:30 game of the week, but it let's them run up to three SEC games on ABC each Saturday. This deal doesn't boost the ESPN channels, it boosts ABC.
For the fan with only an antenna, the only thing that changes at 3:30 on Saturday is that they have to turn to a different channel.
I mean, they don't HAVE to televise that game at 3:30pm on ABC - Each weekend, TV networks 'draft' different games to broadcast. This $300M essentially bought Disney (AKA ESPN/ABC) the first 'draft pick' from the SEC games.
It also bought the complete flexibility to schedule SEC games whenever and wherever they want to put them on the schedule.
Some of us have called out the ACC's TV deal being bullshit from the beginning and getting less than zero "bump" from famous Notre Dame... But people didn't want to hear it.
theeeeeeeeeeeere you are!
I think ND gives us a pretty good bump, and I think we'd be in a worse spot without them (which shows you how terrible swafford did with this TV deal).
Ill borrow a modern social media meme:
People: ND is good for the ACC, because they will elevate bowls and TV revenue
Same People: Yes, our TV deal and bowl lineup are the worst in the P5 and roughly the same pre-ND's football "association", but ND is still king.
The ND deal (prior to this year) increased the ACC's TV revenue by roughly an extra half-million per season (per team). The trade off is worth it IMO.
The only good thing about the ND deal is that it gives VT a legit opponent every once and a while as our scheduling hasn't been great in a long long time.
But the rest of the deal sucks because ND is still with NBC and no one cares about ACC football. It has been a 1 team league for 30 years.
I have zero confidence in the league offices to sell basketball either. The marquee games got diluted due to expansion and while I honestly thought BE basketball was better, those teams have been terrible. Pitt feel off a cliff, BC hasnt been great, Cuse is just eh. UofL was a good addition but not really a BE team to me. But the fact that the ACC, the premier basketball league doesn't games on ESPN or ESPN2 just about every night is terrible. The league has failed the teams.
@JohnSwofford
$300M for 1 game per week, split between 14 teams across 12 weeks... That's an addition $1.7M per team each week. Insane.
Let's hope this season convinces ND to join in football and we can work out some deal with NBC like the SEC has for the Game of the Week. That's what we need to happen. Also need to permanently scrap divisions and have this year's scheduling format or something similar for better matchups.
ND has already said they are going independent again next year and have no desire to join the ACC long term
I'm not interested in a conference without divisions unless the conference either adds enough games or decreases the number of teams to create a round robin.
In a 14-team conference, you could have 3 annual rivals and play every other team every other year and keep the 8-game schedule. There's almost literally no reason we need divisions.
Tiebreakers. Figuring out the top two teams among a group that didn't play each other is a mess.
It'll probably just take significantly fewer steps than it does now before just being settled via a rankings system (either CFP or the SportSource Analytics ratings mentioned in the current tiebreakers). First would be H2H, then record against common opponents, then record against highest-ranked common opponent, then record against second-highest-ranked common opponent, and on down the list, and then you'd use rankings.
Not much different than now, except there's no guaranteed H2H at the top to help smooth out the process.
I'd rather have head to head and settle it on the field.
And I'd rather play Clemson every other year instead of once every 6 years.
But hey, I guess that means you're happy with the current setup.
Or we could have stayed at 12 teams, added a 9th game, cut the permanent crossover and play every team two out of three years.
Well that ship has sailed, unless you think there's a chance for us to kick out two schools.
Any suggestions where to go from here? 9th game and elimination of permanent crossovers would mean we play everyone in the other division 3 out of 7 years, but would result in imbalanced home-away schedules and reduce the chance for marquee non-conference matchups, not to mention that it would require a complete reshuffling of the divisions to reduce (but not eliminate) the loss of major annual rivalries.
By eliminating divisions entirely, you get a bunch of benefits: a much more balanced schedule, retaining all of the major rivalries, and a greater chance at a more compelling matchup in the ACCCG. Really, the only tradeoff is a higher chance at a less clear step for breaking ties, but the current system is already complex and potentially ambiguous depending on how the wording is interpreted (I'm pretty sure we've had a number of conversations on this very topic in years past).
I would look at 4 pods of 4 teams. You play 3 teams in your pod every year, you play another pod 2 years in a row, you have a primary and secondary crossover where the primary is every year the 2nd is 4 out of 6 years. This way in 6 years you play home and home with every team.
That solution would require adding two schools to a conference that already feels a bit bloated, and you are somewhat limited in how you distribute the crossovers. And would you keep the divisional format for conference championship selection, even though the divisions change every year? If so, there are already a lot of people that have a hard time keeping track of which teams are in which divisions, and they've been largely the same for 16 seasons now. If not, you're sacrificing a lot of flexibility and schedule balance in favor of a weird semi-divisional structure for the sole purpose of scheduling ease.
Not saying I'm completely against it. If the ACC decides to add 2 teams, that would be somewhat of a compromise between people who like divisions for whatever strange reason and people who prefer to actually play the teams in their conference occasionally. It just still isn't the ideal situation from a competitive standpoint.
Good thing we joined the SEC.
I'll blame Fuente for that too.
In case anyone doesn't think that these huge media deals make a significant difference...
In 2007 the Big Ten Network was launched
in 2008 the ACC was leading the ACC-Big Ten challenge 10-0, with most years not really being that close, and people seriously asking whether it should be canceled.
Since 2009, when the money from that network started kicking in, the Big Ten has won 7 years to the ACC's 2, with 3 ties.
The boost is real. And its hurting the ACC.
It's almost as if football and it's money lifts up everything around it
This pushes ACC games further into ESPN purgatory. Most 8pm ESPN games will be SEC now. Swofford is a light weight
The ACC is a lightweight compared to the SEC when it come to football. All conferences aren't equal.
Right, but last Saturday night VT/Clemson was on ABC at 8pm. Starting in 2023, that game will not be played on ABC over Bama vs. anybody, etc.
The conferences are going to have to start writing some guarantees into their side of the deals. Like part of the American's deal is that at least 3 games a season have to be on ABC.
The challenge here is that the ACC deal with ESPN now runs to 2036 for both the ACC Television media rights and the ACCN rights. Going to be a long time before they can change that.
Probably right, but the SEC does have a longstanding history of playing games at 3:30 ET. Maybe that stays the time slot for the top tier SEC game in the future, leaving the ABC night game to be either an ACC or Big Ten game, as it tends to be right now. The Big Ten also does like early games so maybe we get something like a Michigan/OSU at noon, Alabama/Auburn at 3:30 and Clemson/? at 7:30, all of which might be must-watch games that are not competing with each other. Just turn on ABC at noon and sit on the couch all day.
The SEC has the 3:30 game because that's what the CBS deal was for.
CBS gets first pick of SEC games and it's on at 3:30. They also got rights for a couple of extra games per year, so occasionally they would get a noon or primetime game to make a doubleheader.
Prior to the SEC Network launching, CBS had an exclusive on the 3:30 window for the SEC. That's why so many SEC games ran in primetime on ESPN or ESPN2 -- because they couldn't go to ABC, and they couldn't go to 3:30.
That restriction got relaxed when SECN launched because they couldn't really get away with not programming the middle of the afternoon.
It might not always be on at 3:30, but I'd be willing to bet that most weeks come 2023 will have at least one SEC game on ABC each Saturday.
Why can't ESPN put SEC games on ABC? I know this year is weird, but Florida played Vandy on ABC just a few weeks ago, and if that was truly the first SEC game broadcast on ABC in decades I would've expected to see something (ANYthing) about it.
There's two types of TV rights: over-the-air broadcast and cable. ESPN only has the cable rights to the SEC. CBS has the over-the-air rights.
The Florida/Vandy game was a last minute schedule rearrangement when Clemson/FSU got cancelled at 9 am on a Saturday. I don't know what kind of magic ESPN worked to get that to happen, and it doesn't look like anyone else has figured it out. But that's a rare 2020 exception.
I think the perception of the Big Ten liking noon comes from two factors:
-several of their schools are in cold climates that would make late season night games be considered cruel and unusual punishment. (That's pretty much how we got a couple of the primetime Black Friday games, because Iowa-Nebraska wasn't going to be played after dark.)
-Fox realized that the noon timeslot actually generates big numbers for them, so they leaned into it. And Fox has the primary rights to the Big Ten.
Yeah, the Big Noon Saturday is a FOX thing, not necessarily a B1G thing. And something tells me that FOX gets better numbers at noon because the SEC game of the week is always at 3:30, and ESPN puts their biggest two games in prime-time on ABC and ESPN.
I don't think the SEC will give up their established branding and viewership dominance of the 3:30 timeslot, but there is no doubt (as stated) that they will also be landing more primetime games as a result of this on ESPN/ABC.
I think they will have their cake and eat it too.
Just ABC. They already own the primetime slot on ESPN.
Just thought about this one...that $300m/yr figure better have some money set aside for that amazing intro music to the SEC on CBS. That is the music that tells me that football is about to happen. BAAAA-B-B-BAHHHHH! BA BA BAA BAHHHHHH!!
that, and the voice of verne lundquist
Fire John Swofford into the sun.
Here's the release straight from the SEC.
Key point:
If we ignore the prestige and money aspects of the deal, and look from a pure scheduling/logistic point of view, it's basically the same deal that the ACC has without having to leave some table scraps for the stupid RSNs. Although I do wonder if this will make the SECN alternate channel obsolete.
Most likely scenario is that ESPN rebrands SECNA to ACCNA, now that they have more freedom to schedule SEC games wherever and whenever.