Tomahawk Nation

FSU Basketball Signs Another 7 Footer

2012-05-16T21:04:28Z

FSU Basketball Signs Another 7 Footer

This kid is a physical freak: 7'1, 290 pounds of muscle, and a 7'8 wingspan. Pretty raw in terms of basketball skill, but you can teach that. Can't teach size.

Derrick Brooks Says The Big XII Approached Florida State, Not The Other Way Around

2012-05-16T15:13:02Z

Derrick Brooks, a former Florida State linebacker, eventual NFL Hall Of Famer, and former Florida State trustee said today on Yahoo! sports radio with Tim Brando that as far as he knows, the Big XII actually approached Florida State, and not the other way around. That is contrary to the popular belief of many fans. Here is the tweet by one of the radio show's producers.

Audio: Derrick Brooks on The @timbrando Show saying the Big 12 approached Florida St, not the other way around.yahoosportsradio.com/?p=24111
— Patrick Netherton (@PTNetherton) May 16, 2012

This is, to say the least, a bombshell. Both the Big XII and Florida State have denied that any talks have taken place. Brooks is the first representative (former trustee) to go on the record and say that talks have been taking place.

Informed observers believed that talks have been taking place, though both sides would deny it to avoid tampering/contractual interference issues. That might be more difficult after Brooks' statement

Rule No. 1 about Sunshine Laws. Don't have a former University Trustee go on national radio and talk about skirting them.
— Ira Schoffel (@IraSchoffel) May 16, 2012

Would love to sit in on the meetings where the ACC deliberates suing the Big 12 now.
— Mark Ennis (@Mengus22) May 16, 2012

Of course, Brooks is a former trustee and couched his statement in the "my understanding" language, which would make a claim much tougher.

Brooks statements come on the heels of Florida State's BOT chair saying that FSU needs to look elsewhere, including the Big XII, and Florida State's president, Eric Barron, saying that Florida State is quite happy in the ACC.

Florida State is by far the most valuable program in the ACC, and a potential move to the Big XII could give Florida State up to 50 percent more TV revenue annually.

Thoughts?

FSU Athletics Budget and the USA Today Data - We Maxing out Credit Cards?

2012-05-16T13:00:42Z

Oh the good ol' internets. Where bloggers can have disagreements via twitter over athletic budgetary data compiled by a 3rd party. David Wunderlich, of TeamSpeedKills.com (follow him @year2 and check out his piece on college revenues and profits), posited via twitter yesterday that, based on the USA Today story, FSU athletics were $16 million 'in the hole' or 'in the red.' This prompted me to say, based on the numbers in the story, "nuh uh, FSU over spent by 500k, strike that, over spent by 800K + last year, you are adding the numbers wrong, I'm adding them correctly, come at me bro." In the end, both of us were wrong. Though I'm not sure he is willing to say he agrees with this statement, I hope this article goes a ways in convincing him.

Inside we'll figure out why I was WAY off with my 800K number and why saying FSU athletics is $16 million 'in the hole' is also not accurate.

First up, the chart. I took a screen grab of the FSU data from the USA Today info you can find here. Click on the + symbol found next to each school and all sorts of nice numbers pop up. For our purposes, I have highlighted numbers that we will refer to as we go (made it as big as I could, probably better off clicking on it and looking at it in another window).

The first discrepancy between us can be found at 1, student fees, year 2011. For the purposes of figuring out which programs are 'profitable' these numbers are removed following NCAA guidelines. In Florida State's case, the entire $7.5 million is paid by students when they pay their tuition. This is the athletics fee that all students should be familiar with. Students do not pay (unless they chose to buy better seats) for tickets to any Florida State athletic event, including football. All students, including grad students pay up front as part of tuition, whether they attend any sporting events or not.

For other teams like Alabama, for the past 4 years, they have reported $0 student fees. I'm guessing that students pay reduced prices for football and most likely other sports. And again you have a school like Auburn, that while they charge for football, they also collect student fees/athletic fees.

These student fees are not eligible revenue when contemplating how profitable a program is. Even though in FSU's case, it is basically the same as other programs that charge student admission to athletic events, the difference being FSU can't report it as 'ticket sales.' However, this does not mean that you remove these funds, in FSU's case $7.5 million, from the athletic budget. Indeed, as you can see from the chart, they are included in the total revenue (2) available to the athletic department. For it to count towards an actual 'hole' or to count towards FSU's athletic operations not being able to pay bills, these funds would simply have to not exist.

My error when first looking at the data was even worse. I added the student fees to the revenue before clicking on the '+' to see that they were already combined. This gave me a much higher number for revenue which fueled my "FSU only spent 800K over budget" comment which was oh my goodness so, so wrong.

Now, let's move past all that and dive in a bit further shall we? Understanding how the student fees works is only a portion of the $16 million 'in the red' comment. We still have a large portion to wrap our heads around.

Believe it or not, FSU athletics used to make money. It was profitable. This built up cash reserves. Exactly how much is unknown to me. I would call Spetman but I understand he isn't taking questions right now. As we can see from the data, from 2006 to 2010, FSU netted almost $19.9 million in reserves from athletic operations. Not sure what the total reserves were prior to 2006, but hopefully the $19.9 added to a healthy total. Hopefully.

Now we get to 2011. What in the world caused FSU to see such a dramatic increase in expenditures over the previous year (4)? Are we running everything at FSU on a Capital One card? The answer is no. The university saw fit to spend existing funds for substantial facility improvements (3). The practice fields got a long over due, much needed overhaul. Original price tag was $2.5 million though I believe the final price had substantial overruns. Sounds pricey, but 3,000 dump trucks full of red clay removed, new drainage system, etc. Needless to say, that kind of operation is expensive. Another substantial project finished in 2011, the FSU weight room. FSU, though there is no new building to point to and drool over, spent a substantial sum on facility improvements. Important to note, these are planned expenditures for facility improvements that are part of an approved budget. As you can see, the normal buildings/grounds budget is in the mid $11 million range and it swelled to almost $21 million. I'm guessing 2007 and 2008 were more because we got those awesome new video screens and ribbon boards in the stadium (this is pure speculation).

So again, the question. Is FSU $16 million in the red or $16 milion in the hole? The answer is simply no. FSU is not going to have to reduce its budget by $16 million or the $7.5 million or get millions from the state (never happening) to pay for staff, planes, and powerade. Though if FSU does not choose to do more athletic renovations, it will go down by the cost that was associated with 2011 renovations or even up if it is decided funds should be spent in 2012 on more (seriously doubt this unless major *AHEM* changes are made).

Now, having gone through all that, is everything A OK at FSU? That answer is also no. FSU expenses are rising and seem to be outpacing revenue. But it is important to note, FSU's athletic budget is planned out in advance based on revenues. That is what prompted the 'potential' $2.4 million dollar shortfall talk from FSU admin. That is for a future budget in which funds have yet to be spent. They will not ever get to mid year scenario and say, "Holy crap, we are $16 million in the hole, fire Jimbo's army of support staff, sand volley ball was a bad idea, and crank FireCoachHam.com back up." No, instead they just won't give Ham or his staff a raise or contract extension next year. Awesome.

You can see from the data (5) scholarship expenses have increased a significant amount. As the state continues to either raise tuition or allow the university to raise tuition, this expense will continue to rise accordingly. Coaching salaries have gone up (6) as FSU has had to fend off schools willing to pay ridiculous amounts for ~~players~~ coaches. 'Other expenses' has greatly increased since 2008, even though it fell off a couple million this past year. Jimbo Fisher, "aint not going to recruit the right way." It also make sense looking at the data, why FSU wants the entire indoor practice facility to be funded by new booster/fan contributions. It appears FSU is not willing to dip into reserves to pay for anything in the near future. Except potential $2.4 million shortfalls. Maybe.

Coley Harvey, while not going into depth on facility improvements has a lot more info on FSU's finances and why FSU should kidnap all the SEC schools and hold them hostage until they let us join their stupid club.

I hope this clarifies FSU and its associated budget in the USA Today story. If you removed the $9 million or so for renovations, FSU would have actually netted over 600K, but still not been profitable by NCAA or USA Today standards. Right? Right. We make over half a million but not profitable. Clear? Clear. Thanks to David and his willingness to go back and forth with me on the Twitter, otherwise this story wouldn't exist and we'd all be ready to fire Randy Spetman.

BH: Big 12 Shouldn't Let Seminoles Slip Through Its Fingers

2012-05-16T12:54:24Z

BH: Big 12 Shouldn't Let Seminoles Slip Through Its Fingers

Allen Kenney makes some good points.

ACC vs. Big 12 Fan Travel Costs By the Numbers

2012-05-16T12:52:00Z

In light of Bud's excellent discussion about fan travel yesterday, I wanted to add some numbers to the discussion. Some points to be discussed/challenged/investigated/confirmed/refuted are:

A) If FSU moved to the Big 12, it would be more expensive for the average fan (non-student) to travel to away games

2) It would be more expensive/difficult for students to travel to away games

D) The most expensive destinations would likely not be in FSU's division, so fans would only have to travel there for away games about twice in a decade

Lubbock) The most ideal situation for anyone depends on where they live and how much money they have

Manhattan) The hypothetical future Big 12 should include [insert ACC/Big East team(s) here] so fans can travel to closer/cheaper away games

In yesterday's article, Bud argued that most fans who go to away games are already flying, so I decided to compare the costs of flying to ACC destinations with the costs of flying to the current Big 12 destinations. To do this, I used Kayak.com (a flight search site that gives results from nearly every airline, the most notable exception being Southwest) using the following criteria:

Departure airports: Tallahassee (TLH), Jacksonville (JAX), Tampa (TPA), Orlando (MCO), Miami/Ft. Lauderdale (MIA, FLL, or PBI), and Atlanta (ATL).

ACC Destinations: Boston College (BOS or PVD), Clemson (GSP or AVL), Duke (RDU), Georgia Tech (ATL), Maryland (DCA, IAD, or BWI), Miami (MIA, FLL, or PBI), North Carolina (RDU), NC State (RDU), Virginia (CHO, LYH, or RIC), Virginia Tech (LYH or ROA), and Wake Forest (GSO).

Big 12 Destinations: Baylor (ACT), Iowa State (DSM), Kansas (MCI), Kansas State (MCI or MHK), Oklahoma (OKC), Oklahoma State (OKC or TUL), Texas (AUS or SAT), TCU (DFW), Texas Tech (LBB), and West Virginia (PIT).

Note: If multiple airports are listed, I used whichever one produced a cheaper ticket price. I only considered airports within a two hour drive of the university. Also, in the cases of Miami and Atlanta the hometown games were given values of $0 since no travel would be involved. Atlanta-Clemson was also given a value of $0 since nobody in their right mind would fly that route and I'm not incorporating other travels costs (driving, hotels, etc.) into this analysis.

The dates used for the search were October 5-7, 2012, a randomly selected Friday-Sunday weekend in the fall. Ideally, it would be better to search multiple weekends and average them, but that would take a lot more time.

Results (click images to see larger versions)

And for those of you who, like me, enjoy numbers/spreadsheets/matlab/fortran/etc., here are the same results in text form:

Also of interest are the flight costs to Louisville, since they are being included in much of the realignment discussion. Here are the costs to fly to Louisville (SDF or LEX) from each city:

Tallahassee: $410
Jacksonville: $355
Tampa: $267
Orlando: $226
MIA/FLL: $353
Atlanta: $188

Clearly, flights from the areas where many FSU fans live to Big 12 country are significantly more expensive than flights to ACC destinations. Obviously, these results should be taken with a grain of salt since they're from a very small sample size of flight search results, but the trends in Big 12 vs. ACC are still significant. However, they do not tell the whole story. As Bud said in his article, many of these destinations would only be visited about twice every decade due to the structure of conference divisions. Therefore, more weight should be given to teams in the same division as FSU.

Analysis Part I: The total cost of attending every conference away game

As things currently stand in the ACC, FSU's divisional opponents are BC, Clemson, Maryland, NC State, and Wake Forest, so FSU travels to each of those universities five times in a given 10-year period. Miami is also included in this group because of the continuous yearly rivalry. UF will not be considered as this analysis is only including conference foes and UF is within driving distance of the majority of FSU fans in the southeast anyway. This leaves five Coastal Division opponents that FSU would travel to twice in a decade. If some lucky FSU fan were to have enough money and free time to travel to every intra-conference road game over the course of a decade, their average yearly flight costs (from each different departure city) would be:

Tallahassee: $1361.40/year
Jacksonville: $1183.50/year
Tampa: $1004.80/year
Orlando: $888.90/year
MIA/FLL: $818.70/year
Atlanta: $812.4/year

To compare these prices to the Big 12, I'm going to use 3 different situations: a 12-team, 14-team, and 16-team league. I'll use Miami as the other addition to the 12-team league, add in Georgia Tech and Clemson in the 14-team league, and Louisville and Virginia Tech in the 16-team league. These lineups are all speculation, of course, and only for the sake of research/argument.

12-team Big 12

The divisional alignment in this case is hard to predict. Would they want FSU, Miami, and WVU in the same division for geography's sake? If so, which three other teams would join them? Or maybe they'd want FSU and Miami to be split up so the rest of the schools get to play in Florida at least once every two years? This is the situation I'll use.

Division 1: FSU, Texas, Oklahoma State, WVU, Kansas, Baylor

Division 2: Miami, Oklahoma, Kansas State, Texas Tech, TCU, Iowa State

Although the Big 12 currently has nine conference games, I believe they would go back to having eight conference games and a conference championship if they had 12 members. If the Big 12 in this scenario has the same setup where every team has a cross-divisional rival that they play every year, FSU would of course continue to play Miami. The average yearly costs for traveling to each conference away game over the course of a decade would be:

Tallahassee: $1657.60/year
Jacksonville: $1467.40/year
Tampa: $1297.60/year
Orlando: $1286.40/year
MIA/FLL: $1126.90/year
Atlanta: $1253.80/year

These results are on the order of $300-$400/year more expensive than the ACC totals, with the highest increases being out of Orlando and Atlanta.

14-team Big 12

With 14 teams, a cross-divisional yearly rival is less likely to happen, so I'm going to put FSU and Miami in the same division now so they can play every year. A geographic division is still awkward here, but let's do it anyway.

Division 1 (East): FSU, Miami, Clemson, Georgia Tech, WVU, Iowa State, TCU (Kansas is technically the easternmost of the remaining schools after Iowa State but TCU makes more sense here since it's new to the Big 12 and Kansas would want to preserve its rivalry with Kansas State)

Division 2 (West): Texas, Texas Tech, Baylor, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Kansas, Kansas State

With six divisional foes to play every year, the Big 12 would face a choice: eight conference games or nine. I believe they would remain at eight, as that is what the SEC will be doing when it starts its 14-team league this coming fall. So that means each non-divisional matchup would be played twice every six years, one of those being an away game. That means the full cycle will happen every 12 years instead of 10. The average yearly cost of this setup over that 12-year period would be:

Tallahassee: $1605.50/year
Jacksonville: $1414.17/year
Tampa: $1318.83/year
Orlando: $1223.17/year
MIA/FLL: $1111.67/year
Atlanta: $956.83/year

Surprisingly, these numbers aren't significantly cheaper than the 12-team setup, with the exception of those who live in Atlanta (who have no flight costs to Clemson or Georgia Tech).

16-team Big 12

Here is where the divisional alignment speculation gets especially dicey. If using the traditional two-division lineup, you'd likely have to have nine conference games a year, and that would screw up my analysis. Instead, I'm going to go with the "pods" model. In this model, there are four pods of four teams each and each team has two cross-pod rivals (who themselves must be from different pods). Let's use this pod setup:

Pod A: FSU, Miami, Georgia Tech, Clemson

Pod B: Texas, Texas Tech, TCU, Baylor

Pod C: Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Kansas, Kansas State

Pod D: Iowa State, WVU, Louisville, Virginia Tech

For the sake of argument, let's say FSU's first cross-pod rival is WVU and their second cross-pod rival is Baylor.

For two years, pods A and B would form a division, with pods C and D forming the other division. FSU would play all of the teams in pods A and B plus WVU, their first cross-pod rival. For the next two years, pods A and C would form a division and pods B and D would form the other division, so FSU would play all teams in pods A and C plus WVU. In the next two years, pods A and D would form a division, and pods B and C would form a division, so FSU would play all teams in pods A and D plus Baylor, their secondary cross-pod rival, since they would've already had to play WVU per the divisional setup.

This setup has a complete cycle every 6 years. Over those 6 years, FSU would play the other teams in pod A 6 times (3 on the road), WVU 6 times (3 on the road), Baylor 4 times (2 on the road), and the rest of the teams twice (1 on the road). Thus, the average yearly travel costs over that 6-year period for an FSU fan would be:

Tallahassee: $1578.00/year
Jacksonville: $1349.50/year
Tampa: $1246.33/year
Orlando: $1165.67/year
MIA/FLL: $1074.33/year
Atlanta: $889.33/year

The decrease in these numbers is more significant than the decrease from the 12-team model to the 14-team model. However, they're still much higher (~ $200 on average) than the yearly costs for attending ACC away games.

Overall, the results in this section are all heavily dependent on divisional lineups since they determine how often you have to travel to a given school. If you have a specific scenario in mind, let me know what it is in the comments and I'll calculate the results for you.

Analysis Part II: The average (non-student) fan

If you're like the majority of FSU fans, going to every single conference away game is not an option, so the numbers in the previous section do not apply to you. In this section I'm going to consider the case of a fan who currently likes to take two trips to FSU road games a year: one by car and one by plane.

Most of us who live in Florida are only likely to drive to three conference away games: Miami, Georgia Tech, and Clemson (and Clemson is a stretch for a lot of us, especially those who live in Miami like me!). Those who live in Atlanta would probably drive to Clemson or the North Carolina schools. That leaves Virginia, Virginia Tech, Maryland, and Boston College as schools that the average fan would definitely fly to for an away game. How would fans decide which game to go to? That would of course depend on a number of factors, including schedule, ticket cost, cost of accomodations, family nearby, etc. Let's say for the sake of argument that a fan decides to go to the Virginia Tech game, since it's the most expensive option out of the prices that I found.

Let's now consider a 12-team Big 12. Among the current Big 12 schools, none of them are within reasonable driving distance of any of the cities in Florida or Georgia that I'm considering. If Miami were brought into the Big 12 with FSU, that would be the obvious game to drive to, but it would only be an away game every other year. During years in which Miami is a home game, in order to go to two conference away games this same fan would need to fly to both. The cheapest options would depend on the fan's location, but overall the cheapest Big 12 destinations are Pittsburgh (WVU), Austin (Texas), Dallas-Fort Worth (TCU), and Kansas City (Kansas and Kansas State). The only one of these that is, on average, cheaper than flying to Virginia Tech is WVU; the other three are about the same. So the fan would face a dilemma in years in which the U came to Tallahassee: only attend one game or pay twice as much in flight costs to see two games?

With the 14-team and 16-team Big 12 models, there would always be an away game within driving distance (unless the fan lives in Miami), so the difference between the Big 12 and the ACC would not be huge. Perhaps the fan would have to shell out around $100 more for the plane ticket for the game he chose to fly to, but that would depend on way too many factors to discuss here.

Analysis Part III: Students

Personally, I did not attend many away games while I was at FSU, but I knew many people who did. Many students take road trips to every game they can (including Tobacco Road schools), riding together so they can take turns driving and save money on gas. Some students fly to away games as well, but the previous section applies to those students, with the added detail that Tallahassee is by far the most expensive departure airport out of the cities considered so it's already expensive to fly to ACC games. In this section I will only discuss the ramifications for those students who drive to games.

From our current ACC schedule, in a given year FSU will play either Wake Forest and Clemson on the road or NC State and Miami on the road, all four of which are reasonable for students to drive to in a group. So in a given year we would expect a football-crazy student to attend two road games, with more hard-core students attending more.

12-team Big 12: Aside from Miami (or whichever other team would leave along with FSU), no other schools in this hypothetical Big 12 are within reasonable driving distance from Tallahassee. The closest is Texas, at 14 hours. Some hard-core students would make the trip, I'm sure, but the average student would not. The students who previously drove to two ACC road games a year would now only make a trip to Miami once every other year. The result would be much lower student support at road games. Some of them might fly to a game every year instead, but the overall student support at these games would still be lower.

14-team and 16-team Big 12: Driving times would be more reasonable to the closest away games, but students would still not be able to go to as many away games overall without flying to some.

Conclusions

For those FSU fans who are able to travel to as many away games as they'd like, the increase in flight costs would be significant if FSU moved to the Big 12. However, the more ACC teams there are in the new Big 12, the less of an increase these fans will see in flight costs. Louisville would also be a cost-beneficial addition as flights to Louisville are not as expensive as those to most Big 12 destinations.
The average fan who likes to go to two away games a year (one by road, one by air) would be negatively affected by increases in flight costs in years in which UM came to Tallahassee, possibly forcing them to only attend one game. This is less of a concern if the Big 12 expands to 14 or 16 teams.
Students would be most affected by the conference switch, as they would be forced to fly to most away games they would want to go to, rather than being able to drive and share costs among groups.
Additions of Miami, Georgia Tech, Clemson, and Louisville to the Big 12 would all aid in helping travel costs stay low(er). Virginia Tech would not.

Note: I'm in no way trying to endorse the move to the Big 12 one way or another. This topic has been mentioned many times so I just wanted to analyze it using actual numbers to see what the results would be.

Defending the three: a study of philosphies

2012-05-15T23:49:37Z

Defending the three: a study of philosphies

Florida State plays a tenacious man-to-man that fronts the post at all times, leading to few interior opportunities and plenty of contested bombs. As we saw in the earlier chart, 66.5 percent of FSU opponent jumpers were threes -- nearly 20 percentage points higher than Wisconsin's rate. The Seminoles ranked 294th in three point attempts allowed, at 36.4 percent of overall shots. They depend on their length -- they place a priority on size in recruiting, even on the perimeter -- to contest long-range shots.

Is FSU Really The ACC's Most Valuable Team?

2012-05-15T16:19:00Z

I've been a long-time reader of Tomahawk Nation (among other SB Nation sites) but decided it was finally time to make things official and get an account. I've taken quite an interest in the ACC/ESPN negotiations and the potential for conference realignment so I thought I'd do some analysis to try to determine whether FSU and/or Clemson have legitimate reasons to consider a change from the status quo. I also saw an argument on Carolina March yesterday that got a little heated regarding FSU's position in the league (many Carolina fans feel that FSU fans are overvaluing their team's importance), and noticed that neither side really had any analytical basis for their argument. Therefore, I figured it might be a fun topic to explore.

My goal is to use data to assess the relative value of the various ACC teams and to determine whether FSU and/or Clemson are really ‘subsidizing' the Tobacco Road teams as many fans claim. The underlying assumption is that ESPN makes money from advertisers based on total viewership, so the teams with the greatest number of viewers should be valued at a higher level than the teams that don't bring in the same digital footprint.

I'd like to first touch on the process that I used and also be upfront about inherent shortcomings with the data. I'm certainly open to criticism and/or feedback, so if any of you guys have constructive advice to share please feel free. Also, if anyone wants to check the data or use it for other analysis please let me know. With that disclaimer, here is the process that I used:

The goal is to determine the total number of fans who viewed each team's regular season Men's Football and Men's Basketball games in the 2011 season. By comparing total viewership across these sports, it should be possible to determine a team's relative value since advertisers ultimately pay for eyeballs, and fan demographics for ACC teams should be relatively constant (i.e. a NC State fan is not more valuable than a Maryland fan to an advertiser).

Other sports were excluded because nearly all of the value from TV contracts is derived from football and basketball. Online programming was excluded simply because I couldn't find enough data to properly assess its valuation... I assume it is generally consistent with the trends in the TV data, though. I also don't think this should materially impact the rankings since ESPN likely relegates the least valuable programming to web-only content. 2011 data was used because it was most readily available (note: this is a shortcoming in the analysis and one that could be corrected if anyone wants to volunteer 3-4 hours of time to help build a bigger dataset)

Step One: Determine total viewership for each program's football team (2011 regular season) by using Nielson ratings and audience data to determine viewership for different types of games. Note that I performed a detailed breakdown to find the average viewership for national and regional games broadcast on ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, and regional affiliates. I also broke down games by their start time (i.e. Noon, Afternoon, Night, or Weeknight) so that estimated viewership numbers reflect a fairly detailed prediction.

Look at games played by each team during the season and the various channels/time-slots for each of the games. Estimate the likely TV audience for games where data is not available based on a regression developed based on similar games throughout the year. Again, this is an inherent problem with the available data... I have to use season-long averages since I don't have all of the team-specific figures. I think it's the best guess I can develop with the data that is available. . Sum all of the viewership information and compare across teams

Step Two: Determine total viewership for each program's basketball team (2011-12 regular season) by again using Nielson ratings to estimate average ACC viewership for ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, and regional games. Look at games played by each team during the season and the various channels/time-slots for each of the games. Estimate likely TV audience for games, summarize, and compare

Step Three: Assign a multiplier to Football Viewership in order to reflect its higher valuation by corporate sponsors. This can certainly be a point of debate, but I chose to use a 67/33% split based on information I found in a presentation that Nielson provided in 2011: http://www.slideshare.net/ceobroadband/state-of-the-media-2011-year-in-sports-11339432

To those who are asking ‘Why would a network pay more for football rights than basketball rights?' here are a few reasons:

Football games are longer (i.e. more time for commercials)
The audience is generally broader for college football games (i.e. men, women, students, alums, etc)
The regular season matters more in football so fan engagement is higher (the vast majority of value from NCAA basketball is realized in March and most of these rights are not owned by ESPN or its affiliates)

By applying some basic math, this assumption yields the following valuation for each viewer of an ACC regular season game for football and basketball

Hopefully that process and the caveats about the data are clear, but I'm happy to answer any questions in the comments section below. I'm also new to posting so the use of bullet points may have made this confusing.

OK - now to the fun stuff. So, is FSU really the most valuable team in the ACC? According to the way that I'm considering a team's value, the answer is a pretty clear ‘Yes'. Here's a quick summary chart along with some key takeaways. I'll also provide additional data later in the post to clarify some of the points.

Some interesting observations:

Duke is roughly equal to the median level in the ACC for two reasons: (1) exceptionally poor football viewership; (2) majority of basketball's value is realized in post-season play which is not included in this analysis
Boston College is very poorly represented because data is pulled from the 2011 season; BC football and basketball were both very bad last year
Florida State's league impact on television in 2011 was likely greater than the combined impact of Maryland, Wake Forest, and BC across basketball and football
The impact of FSU and Clemson is almost equal to the combined impact of the five lowest ranked teams in the ACC (BC, Wake, Maryland, UVA, NCSt)
Despite message board rumors, it doesn't look like NC State would be a very attractive pick up in the short term for the SEC as it doesn't command a whole lot of viewership relative to its ACC peers; the same could be said for GT.
If the ACC pursued revenue sharing as part of its revised deal with ESPN, it could be argued that based on teams' viewership values the TV rights could be fairly divided as follows ($ millions per year):

Using viewership as a metric for valuation, it seems plausible that FSU, Clemson, UNC, Miami, and VT are all underpaid relative to their positive impacts on the league. FSU may have a legitimate gripe with the distribution, particularly given the fact that Wake and BC were basically free riders last year. I'm sure this is where people will start asking questions about how I came up with the numbers, so here's a summary of some of the key outputs that you'll probably want to see:

FSU fans should be happy to note that the football team has the highest number of viewers (due largely to the massive 9m+ viewer draw of the Oklahoma game), and that the basketball team also placed third (thanks to upsets of Duke and Carolina on ESPN during the regular season). Again, keep in mind that this excludes post-season play for both sports. This translates into a #1 overall ranking for FSU in terms of projected value, and an indexed value of 1.88 (meaning 1.88 times greater than the median ACC team - you can think of that as being Duke or GT in 2011).

Here is some football-specific data for ACC teams:

Since ABC, ESPN, and ESPN2 are the most valuable networks, it should be pretty evident that the boys in Bristol think that FSU, Clemson, Miami, and VT are the conference's cash cows (at least for Football). For example, UVA only attracted 3 high-profile network games despite its strong season, and those were against the conference's premier teams (@ FSU, @ Miami, @ VT).

You may recall earlier in the post that I mentioned that I used some fairly advanced metrics to determine likely viewership figures for ACC football games. I don't want to overblow the process and make it sound like hardcore econometrics, but I used some basic regressions to estimate viewership numbers based on a game's timeslot and network. Here are some screen shots of the data. I'm happy to provide you with the actual data in Excel format, if you'd like:

And here's a screen shot of a small part of the full NCAA football dataset for 2011:

Similarly, here is the data that I used to assess each team's ACC basketball viewership:

No surprise here - UNC and Duke dominate the ACC's ESPN basketball programming. In fact, the rest of the ACC really only gets on the mother channel when they're playing one of the two teams located along 15-501. For example, Maryland was on ESPN five times last year (@ Illinois, vs. Duke, vs. UNC, @ Duke, @ UNC). The same holds true for most of the other teams in the ACC. I was personally surprised to see that Virginia Tech had such a strong basketball following.

So, what do you guys think? Is FSU really almost twice as valuable as Duke? Are Clemson and FSU worth almost as much as the bottom half of the ACC combined? Am I making errors in how I'm evaluating the relative rankings?

More broadly, should football really be that much more valuable to advertisers than basketball? Did anyone realize that BC was such a dumpster fire last year? I thought they were supposed to bring the North East market to the ACC.... Guess not. Does that have any larger implications for the market footprint/eyeballs theory of Big 12, ACC, or SEC expansion?

Like I said, if you have any ideas on how I can adjust the data I'd be happy to hear them.

President Barron Clarifies Memo Regarding FSU To The Big XII

2012-05-15T14:22:39Z

Florida State president Eric Barron spoke to the Tallahassee Democrat about the email he sent out Monday on FSU's potential move to the Big XII or staying in the ACC. Here are some quotes:

"I tried to let them know that this is a complicated issue," Barron said.

"There are definitely some people who said, ‘Don't comment. Just ignore it all,'" Barron said. "But I made a habit of whenever alumni write to me, to write right back. Of course, I think a lot of people in the university are frustrated this gets so much attention and all the terrible things that have happened to our academics on campus get so little attention."

"At least half of the emails I'm getting are saying that this $2.9 million is too much to give up," Barron said. "This was my attempt to explain that there are a lot of factors to consider. You have to realize all the travel costs that would come in the Big 12. We don't have to fly to every game now in the ACC. We would have to in the Big 12. With the costs there, it may not be as big an advantage as others might think."

He goes on to say that he is very much open to exploring all issues and that everyone needs to keep an open mind. And he is absolutely correct that much of what the Big XII could offer, and which teams might come with, is completely speculative.

Make sure to read the rest at the Democrat.