Optimizing College Football Conference Membership
The most common reason given for the departure of eight of the PAC12 schools to other conferences is money. The media rights fees were too small. Saying media money was the cause is like saying gravity is the cause of plane crashes; it’s true but it doesn’t give much insight.
The product the PAC12 produces and sells to the media is an audience. Media packages correlate pretty closely with viewership. Media have to pay for the games in advance; they don’t know which teams will be ranked, which will generate national interest or land national coverage, or other details of the upcoming seasons. So estimated viewership depends heavily on the average viewership in the past.
Consider the PAC 12’s TV viewership in the 2022 season (source: Medium). The average weekly football viewership for 119 schools is reported, ranging from 5.8 million (Ohio State) to 9,000 (James Madison).
Here is how PAC12 schools ranked in 2022 (average weekly viewership in parens):
1.Oregon 12th (2M)
2.USC 14th (2M)
3.UCLA 24th (1.6M)
4.Utah 33rd (1 M)
5.Washington 34th (1M)
6.Wash State 41st (.9M)
7.Cal 45th (.8M)
8.Stanford 47th (.8M)
9.Oregon St 57th (.6M)
10.Arizona 62nd (.5M)
11.Colorado 67th (.3M)
12.AZ State 71st (.3M)
Boston College, Boise State, and Air Force had higher viewership in 2022 than some PAC12 schools.
TV viewership isn’t the only measure of value, but still a key input to the media package. Ohio State has a weekly average of 5.8M, the top four schools are all over 4M per week. These schools had as many viewers in a week as most of the PAC schools had in 4 or 5 weeks, and more than ASU had in an entire 12 game season.
2022 viewership was consistent with the recent past. The list below shows PAC school viewership rankings for the 2015 to 2019 period as reported by Nate Silver. As he points out, Washington State isn’t typically viewed as a premium football brand yet there are six PAC teams with smaller viewership during that time.
Nate Silver’s Pac12 Team Valuation
Silver has an interesting valuation of the P12 teams based on a composite index. It’s a proxy for how they are viewed as potential “adds” by other conferences. His Big 10 “acquisition” forecast from a year ago was pretty spot on. You can see his valuation estimates here:
For a slightly different view, you can look at the Wall Street Journal’s evaluation (2019) of college football programs as if they were professional franchises; they are ranked by estimated total market value. The top-valued program in 2018 was Texas with a valuation of $1.1B; USC, UCLA, and ASU are ranked 23, 24, and 25 at around $300M, or a third the value of the top programs. It also shows some of the decline in some PAC schools since then.
School rankings in other conferences tell the same story: a few schools draw big viewership while some schools add little to the media package value. Since conferences split fees equally, big-draw schools have incentives to leave a weak conference, and other conferences have an incentive to add them because they increase the size of the pie more than the slice they will take. Conferences add schools until the forecasted media pie stops increasing enough to cover the added slice.
In 2022, USC had seven times the viewership of ASU or Colorado, four times Arizona, more than three times Utah. But they all get the same slice. This is a recipe for instability; other conferences want the big media draws and big media draws want to quit carrying weaker programs. That’s why Clemson and Florida State want to leave the ACC, another PAC in the making.
Conferences adding schools, like the Big 10 and Big 12, face something like the famous knapsack optimization problem: add teams to your knapsack so the total value is highest given the amount of “space” each team takes up.
PAC12 departures were a result, in part, of the management of the conference’s product. Media buy audiences that they can re-sell, not games or events, and the PAC12 wasn’t aggressive enough in managing their audience. They tended to stay local, replayed games to a regional viewership (PAC12 Network) with regional hosts, and they did little to address disparate conference viewerships. They didn’t do enough to reach out-of-region viewers or schedule the big dogs in ratings and rankings. One result was incentives for some to leave and, then, not much product left to sell when they did.
Money wasn’t the root problem that caused the PAC to fragment, but it was an important evidence of the problem.