My colleague Jerry Carter asked on a recent Street Knowledge podcast if it might be that the addition of two games to the ACC Basketball schedule could end up costing the conference.
The thinking: programs are replacing two non-conference games against mid-majors and small-conference opponents with two more league games.
Two less games with Northeast Southern Midwest State Techs, basically, two more with UVA, Duke, Louisville, UNC.
The UVAs, Dukes, Louisvilles, UNCs, have little to worry about. They’re going to make the tournament.
But if you’re the seventh-best team in the ACC, the eighth, the ninth, OK, sure, you get a chance to get a marquee win that might help you off the bubble. But, there’s also the chance, better than even chance, that you get two more losses.
And of late, you might have noticed, the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee has made it clear that it would rather take the third-best team from a conference like the A-10 or AAC than the eighth- or ninth-best team from a Power 5 like the ACC.
Since the NCAA distributes tournament money to conferences based on participation, this has to hurt in terms of that payout.
The question, then, is how much that hurt gets balanced out in terms of revenue from the ACC Network.
It’s not going to be easy to quantify this, but we can do some back-of-the-envelope math to try to get something to argue about over the virtual water cooler.
Early projections of revenue from the ACC Network have it eventually generating in the area of $280 million-$300 million per year.
That money needs to be split between the ACC and ESPN, of course, and we don’t know the details of how those two will split the money.
Presume a 50/50 split, which is probably generous toward the ACC.
Do that, though, for sake of argument, you get, let’s just say $150 million, again, being generous.
Let’s weigh that against the cost of having, let’s say two teams on the wrong side of the bubble because of the expanded conference schedule.
One team playing one NCAA Tournament game earns in the range of $280,000 that is distributed to the conference for each of the next six years, for a total of $1.68 million.
So, let’s have Notre Dame and Clemson on the wrong side of the bubble this year because of the 20-game schedule. Both get bids and lose in the first round, that’s a bottom-line cost to the ACC of $3.36 million.
You’d look at those two numbers – $150 million a year for the ACC Network, $3.36 million for losing two teams from the NCAA Tournament pool – and you’d say, worth it!
Except …
Is it really the case that adding two more conference games makes the ACC Network that much more valuable to subscribers?
Meh.
If that was the case, wouldn’t the ACC Network already be available everywhere, for example, also including Comcast, the primary cable provider throughout much of the ACC geographic footprint?
Because we’re in the midst of our first 20-game ACC Basketball season. And we’ve had openers up and down the Eastern Seaboard featuring conference games, which still didn’t move the needle for the Comcasts and others that haven’t signed on yet to carry the network.
Fans who have already added the ACC Network, or will do so when their providers make it available to them, don’t really care if the games they get in November and December are conference games or games with lower-level non-conference opponents.
They want to watch their teams, and if not their teams, maybe the league’s marquee teams.
I think the ACC and ESPN have this very, very wrong.
Basically, it’s an ACC game if an ACC team is playing it.
Bottom line: we’re costing ourselves money here.
Another mis-step by the ACC with the ACC Network, another in a long line of them.
Story by Chris Graham
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