A break from Wadegate: A fairly recent article about conference money and the SEC CBS deal

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Let’s start the exercise with a roundup of conference distributions for the 2018 fiscal year.

Big Ten: $51 million per school (actual)
SEC: $43.7 million per school (actual)
Big 12: $38 million per school (actual)
Pac-12: $32.5 million per school (projected)
ACC: $28 million per school (projected)

(Note: Big 12 figure includes an average of $1.5 million for each school from Tier 3/local broadcast rights, which have not been sold to a media partner. Texas and Oklahoma collect millions more from their deals than the other members.)


Next, let’s consider the ACC’s linear network, which launches in the fall.

Revenue projections from the conference, as laid out by former Florida State athletic director Stan Wilcox, show each school receiving a whopping $8 million-to-$10 million initially, with that figure rising to $10 million-to-$15 million once the network is mature.

The Hotline is skeptical of those figures, based on conversations with media industry sources. We’ll calculate 50 cents actual for every dollar projected, then target that figure at the middle of the range laid out by Wilcox.

So half of $12.5 million — the middle of the range of payouts for a mature network — brings us to about $6.25 million per school.

Now, let’s add the SEC’s extension with CBS.

The current, grossly-undervalued contract ($55 million per year) runs through 2023. McManus expects a new deal “well before” that point. That sounds like the next year or two.

Steve Dittmore, a professor of sports management for Arkansas, recently made the case for AthleticDirectorU that the CBS deal could be worth $300 million annually to the SEC.

That might sound exorbitant for one game per week, but it’s the No. 1 regular-season property in college sports and crushes the competition in the ratings game.

Let’s be conservative and project $250 million, then slice the pie 14 ways.

Still, that’s $17.8 million per school per year.

Now, let’s add the linear network revenue to the ACC distribution figure cited above and do the same for the SEC with the windfall from a revised CBS deal.

And to be clear: We are simply applying those revenue streams to the FY18 projections/actuals on a fixed basis. I’m not adding annual 3 or 4 percent increases, which are standard escalators in media deals.

Because the escalators apply to all deals, excluding them from our calculations should not significantly change the difference in payouts from one conference to another.

With the SEC/CBS and the ACC linear pieces added, we arrive at these estimates:

SEC: $61.5 million per school
Big Ten: $51 million per school
Big 12: $38 million per school
ACC: $34.5 million per school
Pac-12: 32.5 million per school

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