As controversial as the rollout of the European Super League concept has been, the fundamental theory driving its formation contains echos of a potential doomsday …
As controversial as the rollout of the European Super League concept has been, the fundamental theory driving its formation contains echos of a potential doomsday scenario for college sports that has been kicked around for years in the media rights world. How much money could a group of elite college football programs make if they broke away from their conferences, pooled their television rights and sold them to a network with an NFL-style package? A lot. A whole, whole lot. “I am not advocating they do this, but suffice it to say, that would be worth quite a bit more than whatever the numbers are you’re getting per conference now,” said Jeff Nelson, the president of data-driven consulting firm Navigate, which has worked with four of the five power conferences in college sports. How much more? Nelson’s rough estimate of a 32-team college football super league suggests that the bigger schools in the SEC and Big Ten could make 2½ times more television revenue than they take in now, while Pac 12 and ACC schools could make five times as much. To be clear, this is not an imminent development or even a serious conversation anyone in a position of power is having right now. It’s more of a long-term theoretical question rooted in the modern history of college football where schools reorganize themselves every dozen years or so into conference configurations that are designed to maximize their value in television negotiations. But within those conferences, just like in European soccer, there are more valuable entities and less valuable entities. Regardless of how much they win, Ohio State and Michigan drive more of the Big Ten’s profits than Purdue and Minnesota, yet they make the same amount of the television money. The SEC doesn’t really need Mississippi State and Vanderbilt to make gobs of cash, yet they get the same 1/14th share — last year it was $45.5 million — as Alabama and Georgia. So it’s natural to wonder if the schools who create the majority of value for college football will decide to just break away like the 12 European teams and create a television product that allows the best brands in the sport to make massive amounts of money and keep it all for themselves. Because of the nature of the two sports, the parallels between college football and soccer aren’t identical. The Super League teams still intend to play their domestic league schedules, and in European soccer, clubs can compete for multiple championships or trophies within a season. But the basic idea of building a season around the richest, most elite, most watched clubs playing each other makes perfect sense as a college football product. What’s more attractive for television? A Southern Cal schedule of Arizona, Oregon State, Utah and Stanford or Oklahoma, Penn State, LSU and Florida State? As an example, Nelson estimated that the viewership of the Michigan-Ohio State every year drives between $10 billion to $15 million in value to the Big Ten television contract, while other games might be wroth around $1 to $2 million.
