Conference realignment: Big Ten interest in additional Pac-12 teams has cooled, Big 12 positioned well
Pac-12 negotiations are about to get interesting as the Big Ten nears an announcement
www.cbssports.com
Dodd is reporting that the B1G's consideration of Stanford, Washington, Cal and/or Oregon is fading. Why? Apparently the rightsholders (translation: TV networks) are not willing to pay an extra $80M to $100M for each add'l team. The logical conclusion is that the rightsholders don't believe that some combination of those four teams would generate enough add'l revenue to cover the cost.
Since the addition of USC and UCLA was announced as the B1G was negotiating the new TV deal, it seems pretty clear to me that the rightsholders assured the B1G that the per school pay out would only increase if USC and UCLA were added to the mix.
If (and I stress "if") what he is hearing is accurate, that likely means that the B1G's new TV deal will be anywhere from $1.2B/year ($80M per school) to $1.6B/year ($100M per school).
It got me thinking. Let's say that the rightsholders gave this offer "we will pay all 2024 B1G conference teams $80M per year for a $1.2B yearly package BUT we'd be willing to pay $100M to each B1G school for a $1.6B package IF the B1G added Notre Dame and Oregon but eliminated two teams." Would the B1G members go for that? If not for $100M/year per school, is there a yearly payout number that would convince B1G members to shed existing schools?
Put another way, if the rightsholders said something to the effect of "we could certainly sweeten the yearly payout to each school significantly if $80M/year didn't have to be allocated to (just for example) Northwestern," might that gain some traction?
Finally, if there is a calculus as to whether teams/schools individually bring value to the rightsholders, I'd love to see the internal numbers as to what "value" they attribute to each team/school. In other words, how much would the rightsholders pay for the B1G if Purdue and Maryland jumped to the ACC or how much would the rightsholders pay for the B1G if Michigan and OSU jumped to the SEC? The data would be quite interesting.