“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” That famed line from George Orwell’s 1945 novel Animal Farm has long been applicable to college sports, where different schools in the same conference have long held unequal value despite those conferences’ public protests to the contrary. That’s shown up in several ways, from the large (conference realignment moves) to the smaller (prominent schools avoiding their conferences’ undesirable midweek, Friday, or early Saturday kickoffs).
But the Atlantic Coast Conference looks perhaps set to fully acknowledge that inequality in a way we haven’t seen yet. That would be specifically paying schools more based on the ratings they draw. On Tuesday night, Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger wrote on the proposal here, and how it might allow the ACC to end its current maze of litigation with the Florida State Seminoles and Clemson Tigers, both of who are suing to get out of their grant of rights and leave the conference.
Dellenger notes that this is a long way from happening, and may not have the two-thirds support believed to be needed for it to pass. But it’s definitely notable that the ACC presidents have at least reviewed a proposal along these lines. It’s also notable that they’re talking about shortening the grant of rights, a key issue for Clemson and FSU. Here’s more from that piece on those fronts:
The conference’s presidents recently examined a proposal that would distribute revenue differently to league members in a move to provide stability and preserve the membership of Florida State and Clemson. Nothing is imminent and particulars of the deal remain mostly private, but the structure’s ultimate goal is to resolve a dispute with the Tigers and Seminoles, both suing the conference in an attempt to exit the league.
…Details around the new revenue structure remain murky, but leaders have reviewed a plan to create a separate pot of revenue to be divided based on media value metrics. This separate distribution would be specifically tied to a school’s television viewership ratings for football and potentially basketball.
Any new distribution would be available to all schools.
Along with the new revenue structure, leaders are examining amending the length of the league’s grant of rights, the binding agreement at the center of lawsuits from the Seminoles and Tigers. The ACC grant of rights, binding the schools together through 2036, would presumably be shortened.
This would be a dramatic step in college sports. The ACC already made some history on this front when they brought in a plan last year to give schools that participate in sports’ postseasons a larger share of postseason revenues (a move also largely made to appease FSU and Clemson, although the former school certainly won’t be hitting those marks this year in football). That was soon copied by the Pac-12 (but wasn’t enough to prevent the eventual exodus there), and it may be picked up elsewhere as well, but it is a radical departure from the idea that each member of a conference gets an equal share of conference media rights revenues.
And the ACC then went further in the last round of expansion last summer. There, they offered just half-shares to Cal and Stanford (and no share at all to SMU) for a while, similar to how the Big Ten brought in Oregon and Washington at a reduced rate after the Pac-12’s collapse. So there definitely was a precedent set there that the new schools were not fully equal (or, at least, that the previous members were more equal). But that was based on when schools entered. And payments based on that, or based on actual on-field success, don’t directly challenge the important college athletics fourth wall that we can’t really talk about programs’ appeal based just on TV numbers (especially when divorced from on-field success). This new approach would do that.
It’s long been known that all schools in a conference are not seen as equal by the TV networks that hand out rights contracts. And indeed, that’s led to a significant amount of hot water around expansion and realignment, from athletic directors relaying their consultations with networks on which schools to add (and then later walking that back after network-attempted denials to claim they’re not manipulating the sport ) to other ADs pointing out how networks are indeed doing this more subtly to past network execs talking about their moves .
But it’s one thing to talk about schools’ ratings value as part of what they bring to a different conference as an expansion target. It’s something else entirely to start handing out different amounts of money within a conference based specifically on ratings rather than on-field performance. And, if that approach did go through, it’s something that might change college sports even more. (It’s also worth wondering if this could somehow wind up in professional sports; the Dallas Cowboys and Jacksonville Jaguars clearly bring different media values, but receive the same distributions from the NFL, and Jerry Jones sued over a similar argument on the marketing side, which wound up cited in the recent Sunday Ticket trial.)
However, a shift to provide ratings-based payments in college sports wouldn’t necessarily be entirely for the worst. As noted above, while schools within a conference may have been considered equal in public comments, they very much haven’t been treated equally in practice when it comes to what TV slots they get or what expansion interest they draw. And the expansion interest in particular has often been a way to address TV value discrepancies.
That isn’t always about straight ratings (it’s sometimes also about conference networks and in-market status , and/or recent football success), but ratings have definitely been a factor there. And, as with the discussion of subtle network valuations , there might be some advantages to being able to address these issues within a conference rather than only with a never-ending circle of realignment. Realignments have a lot of negative effects, especially on sports beyond football, and if there are ways to sort out some of these issues without that, that could have merit. (And in this specific case, if this compromise might end the incredible array of back-and-forth litigation between the ACC, Florida State, and Clemson, that might be very beneficial for everyone but the pocketbooks of the lawyers involved.)
It should be noted, though, that ratings are complicated and come with a ton of necessary context (as anyone who’s covered them for five minutes knows). What network or streaming platform is the game on? Who’s the opponent, and what ratings value do they bring? Did College GameDay (or Big Noon Kickoff , or ACC Huddle , or so on) come to town, and how did that affect the ratings? (And boy, that could start some fun discussions about those shows’ locations if actual money was on the line, similar to some of the debate about awards voting and awards-rewarding contracts.)
It’s very difficult to get an actual quantitative estimate of particular schools’ ratings value. It can be done; indeed, we did an extensive exercise along those lines here in December 2019 , wondering what the four-team playoff might have looked like if it was selected by viewership rather than on-field performance. That estimate saw Ohio State and LSU retain their spots, but Alabama and Michigan subbed in for Clemson and Oklahoma. But it came with a ton of caveats, including assumptions and estimates for games on unrated conference networks or pay-per-view (one Oklahoma game). And the general takeaway was that yes, it’s possible to get a rough or qualitative idea of schools’ relative TV value, but it’s hard to drill down on exact numerical values.
When applied to the ACC, yes, in most years, FSU and Clemson are probably going to be at or near the top in TV value added. That’s why they’re the ones trying to sue to leave for the supposed greener pastures they believe are out there (although it’s quite unclear if those actually exist right now, with neither the SEC nor the Big Ten seemingly overly excited about adding these schools right now). But trying to find an actual formula that not only determines the specific yearly payout there, but also is at least theoretically “available to all schools” (as per Dellenger’s piece) if they wind up being big viewership draws, is going to be highly messy, and come with a lot of arguments about context and how it should be weighed.
We’ll see where this all goes. As mentioned above, Dellenger’s piece carries a lot of caveats. He notes that it’s unclear if this proposal has the support it would need (a two-thirds majority is believed to be needed), and that the discussions around this and other ideas (including shortening the grant of rights) are ongoing. But it’s fascinating to hear about a proposal like this that would radically change revenue distributions within a college conference, and tie those specifically to ratings rather than on-field success. And if that does somehow go through, it might not be surprising to hear powerhouse schools in other conferences wonder if they can get something similar.
[ Yahoo Sports ]
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