In the last several months preposterous realignment rumor after preposterous realignment rumor kept hitting the twitter airwaves. Who knows if there is a grain of truth in there somewhere? Probably not, but let me address one of them that I believe has no true basis – that ESPN would orchestrate the demise of the ACC.
Last year we wrote a couple of articles illustrating why ESPN would prefer the ACC stay intact at least in the short-term (next 5 Years). We looked at the value of the ACC Network to ESPN and at least 4 other separate reasons why ESPN may want the ACC to stay together.
As we looked at the value of the ACC Network to ESPN, we estimated the profit value for ESPN well north of $100 Million a year maybe even in the $125 Million range. At the time we were estimating, but now there are harder numbers.
ACC Perscription authored by @mark_hokie wrote a piece discussing UNC’s recently released revenue numbers, that had UNC receiving $31.5 Million for Fiscal Year 2021-2022 in media rights. That is with the addition of the full distribution of COMCAST. This is a 16% increase from the previous year or about $5 Million.
A minor point is that the new Big 12 deal which is valued at just over $31 Million per school starting in 2025, is where the ACC is at the end of 2022, based on UNC’s reporting. In fairness anything less than a $5 – $10 million difference is basically inconsequential when comparing conferences. Should a 3rd conference pull more than $10 Million ahead of the other two, then it would warrant more discussion.
As ACC Perscription suggests the base ACC media deal probably had a $1 Million increase due to the yearly backloaded structure of most media rights deals.
That would be a $4 Million increase from COMCAST resulting in something reasonably estimated also as ACC Prescription says of $9 Million to $10 Million to each ACC school just from the ACC Network.
Well, you do the math on what this means…
That’s (15 * $9 Million) $135 Million – (15 * $10 Million) $150 Million to the ACC from the ACC Network. As it’s a 50/50 venture with ESPN, that’s $135 Million – $150 Million also going to ESPN. This is even higher than my estimates of last year which topped out at $140 Million.
For a company suffering layoffs, and cost-cutting under Disney does it really seem likely you are going to risk cutting that kind of dollar figure from your bottom line? Any ACC schools to the SEC not only have to raise the value of the SEC’s massive deal they also have to offset the hundreds of millions lost by the loss of the ACC Network.
Certainly, this is not a claim of the ACC’s long-term viability. Without changes to the base media deal, the ACC still has the potential enormous future revenue gap with the Big 10 and SEC to contend with, and I make no definitive statement about what the long-term future will hold.
I suspect the relatively short-term ACC future will be performance-based unequal revenue sharing, but I do feel comfortable in saying ESPN won’t be initiating a behind-the-scenes breakup of the ACC anytime soon. Anything they do with the ACC in that regard would be a reaction to a Big 10/FOX move.
It didn’t make sense last year when some suggested ESPN would push for an ACC breakup and it makes even less sense now.
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