What If the SEC Did What the ACC Is Doing?
ATHENS - After all of the chirping about leaving the ACC from Tallahassee and Clemson, the Tigers and Noles are expected to settle with the league Tuesday that will lock the duo into the league (they were stuck there for a while anyway - no matter if they would admit that or not) for at least the next few years.
The key new addendum to he contentions rights agreement in the ACC is what’s being reported by ESPN this way: “a split in the league's TV revenue, with 40% distributed evenly among the 14 longstanding members and 60% going toward the brand initiative and distributed based on TV ratings.”
ESPN goes on to further report: “Top earners are expected to net an additional $15 million or more, according to sources, while some schools will see a net reduction in annual payout of up to about $7 million annually.”
That’s a noticeable shift for the ACC.
What if the SEC did what the ACC is doing? Now I don't mean watching as its league falls apart, and the SEC becomes not just the dominant player in football, but also in basketball. What if the SEC started paying TV revenues like its less successful, super dysfunctional cousin?
It would mean a lot more money for the power players at the top and a lot less for bottom of the league.
Because I easily have the numbers, and I am not interested in doing more math before writing about the topic/I am lazy, I can report that Alabama (731 million), UGA (443 million), LSU (412 million) and Auburn (373 million) were the most-watched teams in terms of total viewership from 2012-2022. South Carolina (133 million), Missouri (120 million) Kentucky (63 million) and Vanderbilt (44 million) were the least-watched teams in that time.
These numbers are based on all telecasts that are not College Football Playoff bowl games. These numbers are not precisely correct as it relates to pulling out games that are not SEC controlled, like when Georgia plays at Georgia Tech every other year, or when UNC and UGA started the season off against one another in 2016. Those numbers are included in the data above, but are not accurate in terms of what number would be used to calculate the actual division of monies.
But I told you already - I’m not doing three days worth of work to make this point.
The numbers above are correct for all non-bowl games SEC teams played in that period of time. They are the best quick and easy representation for where teams stand in terms of what one would expect moving forward with the ACC’s breakdown of revenue in the future.
60% of the TV money isn’t always the easiest thing to calculate. In the case of the SEC, the league bundles everything together that it can and distributes that to its 16 members. The SEC defines its distributions this way: “revenue generated from television agreements, post-season bowl games, the College Football Playoff, the SEC Football Championship Game, the SEC Men's Basketball Tournament, and NCAA Championships.”
The SEC’s most-recent fiscal year (2024) ended in August. The league said it distributed $808.4 million to league members. For the purposes of this discussion, we will use the $808 million number fully understanding that the percentages used will be correct, but the exact dollar amount certainly will not be.
From 2012-2022, the SEC was watched by 3.6 billion viewers. The league’s two most successful teams secured roughly one third of all views in that decade. Alabama is responsible for 20% of all viewership; UGA 12%.
And yet, Vanderbilt (1%) and Kentucky (2%), receive exactly the same amount of revenue as Alabama and UGA. Is that fair? The SEC schools think it is. The ACC has decided it is not - or two programs with some leverage have decided that. In the ACC’s new model, 60% of the money that is being generated by the league in TV contracts would be lumped together, and then distributed solely on TV ratings.
This is a risk, for the record, for a program like Florida State. You need to win. FSU didn’t bother in 2024. So whereas FSU was a leader in the past on TV, Georgia Tech and others passed them this season. It will also matter if you play on the ACCN, on ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU or ABC. If you are like FSU, and your season went into the toliet quick - that’s going to matter in a very, very big way in the future when games that would usually matter are now shown on the ACC Network because you are trash.
Again, the numbers we are using are not exact, but if the SEC is distributing $808,400,000 per year. 40% of that number will move equally to each school. That’s $323,360,000, or $20,210,000 (for those keeping score at home that’s “about” what the ACC distributes to schools for their participation in football each year).
That leaves $485,040,000 that’s up for grabs based on the size of your audience each week. We know there were 3.6 billion viewers over 11 seasons, or 327,272,727 viewers a year. In that case, each TV set turned on watching would be worth $1.48.
Is the ACC paying out dollar(s) per view? Is there some other formula being used? I can’t know.
But in the case of, say UGA, the ACC formula would suggest a much larger dollar amount of distribution. UGA would already have the $20.2 million each school gets from the distribution. UGA would then add another $59,549,413 from TV viewership numbers (40,236,090 in TV views * $1.48/view = $59,549,413)
The total take, on average for UGA, would be just shy of $80 million a year rather than the $52.5 million the SEC distributed this season (and this season’s number is about to go way, way up over time).
All that said, the SEC has worked as a cohesive group for decades. The easy question if you are at the top of the league is: why not go to this right away? I’ll answer that question with a question: When is the last time UGA won an NCAA Tournament game?
I’ll help, 2002.
In 2023, the SEC got a $34 million payout from the NCAA Tournament. Georgia got as much money from the SEC thanks to that year’s results as Arkansas, which played in the Elite Eight. UGA got paid each year these last two decades of failure on the hardwood - without bothering to win a game.
That is to say, if Vanderbilt is a deadbeat in football, there is no more a deadbeat in basketball than Georgia. And yet that money is sent to Athens in the form of the SEC’s distribution.
Going to the model the ACC has settled on with Clemson and Florida State would destroy the fabric of the way the schools have worked. It would be the destruction of the SEC, and that could come over time.
The ACC is already going to blowup - I wrote about this a week ago. The ACC’s problems, which are numerous and likely terminal, are not the SEC’s problems. That’s why this model is not a fit in the SEC - at least not now or the foreseeable future.
There very would could come a time when State, Vandy and others could be in trouble in terms of their long-term membership in the SEC. The problem with that thinking is that those two have been in the cartel for a long, long time. Vandy and State, specifically, are a part of the ten-team league that predated the league’s expansion in 1992. They have just as much right, if not more, to be in the SEC as Texas, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Arkansas, A&M and Missouri.
FSU and Clemson have been unhappy for a long time with their marriage to the ACC. Its hard to say that’s the case with anyone in the SEC.