Additional College Football Realignment

[coachnorm]

I just don't think Clemson is on the SEC's list. Clemson is not a bigger revenue generator than Auburn or UTenn, and both of those are now below the median (UTex, UGA, LSU, Bama, A&M, and Oklahoma are all bigger revenue generators, so adding them without dropping teams pushes the per team revenue share in the wrong direction). If the Big 10 is going the super conference route with ~20 teams, then the SEC may do so in the hopes that the two super conferences will become the major college football market and become more profitable, but still not sure Clemson is high on the SEC's list rather than the Big 10's.

When you indicate revenue generator are you talking on campus revenue or television viewership revenue for Disney/ESPN? Also, who do you think will be the four additions to the SEC?

[Johnson85]

When you indicate revenue generator are you talking on campus revenue or television viewership revenue for Disney/ESPN? Also, who do you think will be the four additions to the SEC?

I'm talking revenue for TV and/or streaming packages. I don't think the conferences care about anything else because I think schools keep their revenue from ticket sales, merchandising, concessions, etc.

So while Clemson is a big name now and have some bandwagon fans as a result and drive interest from college football fans that aren't necessarily clemson fans, I'm not sure how valuable that is. The SEC already has an in in the South Carolina Market, which is a decent, not huge market. If Clemson has some 8-4 years, I don't think they will retain much interest for very long.

For SEC targets, assuming they can just cherry pick and not have to worry about the Big10 taking any first, I think the first two choices would be UNC and Virginia or Va Tech. Both of those get you a presence in decent sized and growing states that are reasonably affluent. After that, the pickings get less desirable. FSU would probably be next. While it's not as good as it otherwise would be because it's market overlaps some with UF (and also with Auburn and UGA to an extent), Florida is a big state that is still growing pretty rapidly and FSU is still I think a national brand that maintains some cachet even though they haven't had as much success recently. I think there area number of different options after that that aren't terrible and aren't great. Miami is one. 40k students, so still generating a good number of alumni. Third university in Florida isn't ideal, but again, huge state and it gets a presence in South Florida. Only concern would be how committed their fans will be. It's possible USF would be as good of an add long term. I think they are more like 55k students? Not sure how much they care about football and whether they would catch up to Miami on any timescale that would matter for a current realignment. I'd put Miami above getting a third school in Texas or a second school in NOrth Carolina or Virginia, but not real confident in that opinion. An unorthodox approach would be to try to get somebody like Cincinnati. Not really an impressive add right now, but they care about sports. Would being in the SEC make them relevant and create SEC fans in Ohio? I would have thought this wouldn't be a crazy idea except being in the SEC doesn't seem to have done much for Missouri except expose them. I guess somebody has some data about how much revenue adding MIssouri actually created for ESPN.

ETA: I think Big 10 will want the same schools, except that they'd probably prefer FSU over the Virginia schools except for Geography, which obviously doesn't mean a ton anymore. Would make much more sense for the Big10 to add a school from Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida. I'm not sure the SEC has four compelling schools to add. If the Big 10 added UVA, NC St., CLemson, and FSU and the SEC added Va Tech, and UNC, they'd both be at 18 schools. That would let them do 10 game conference schedules. 8 division games, 2 cross overs, an FCS and OOC. Then each year the two best teams would likely be the ocnference champs from each league, and there'd be a Miami, TCU, OK St., USC, Washington, Texas Tech, West Va., UCF, type school that would be a souped up version of the best G5 team complaining that they haven't had a chance to prove they belong.