I've advanced this as a potential way to stabilize ACC membership in the short run. The idea is to skew annual payouts based on the relative value each team brings to the conference. There are many ways to do this, and I offer this as one example.
I used athletic performance as the sole determinant, and I calculated that in three components: football, basketball, and all sports. I applied a 70-20-10 weighting respectively to those three averaged over a three-year time horizon. (One bad year doesn't completely kill your payout.) Here are the current results in millions of dollars distributed...
Football and basketball inputs were conference won-lost percentages, and I used the national Learfield Cup indexes for the all-sports component. Granted, that's a little redundant since Learfield also incorporates football and basketball within their calculation. I simply used it out of convenience.
The total and per-school payouts were obtained as estimates from this LINK projecting the ACC to receive a $30.9 million distribution per school for 2022. For example, the above table shows that U of L would have lost $1.4 million from its equal revenue share by adopting this unequal model.
It's unclear from what I could research, but Notre Dame appears to be paid from the ACC distribution per a formula that's not disclosed. In the model I'm applying here, ND received $6.4 million from basketball and $4,4 million from the all-sports component. Of course, they received zero from football. This model estimate coincidentally matches the payout ND received from the ACC the year before Covid (FY2020).
You can tweak this from 70-20-10 to make it even more heavily grounded in football. While helping Clemson, that would obviously impair the results even more for schools like Duke and Syracuse. The question is how much can you expect conference member schools to voluntarily agree to?
According to the Navigate link above, Big Ten schools are each receiving $57 million this year, and the SEC is receiving $54 million. Upping Clemson's payout to $47 million still lags what they would have received in either of those conferences. But considering their easier access to the CFP currently while playing in the ACC, it makes that pill easier to swallow.
It's interesting that the URS model here is not terribly impactful for the average school. Notice there's only $6 million difference between schools 3 and 10 on the list. It rightfully rewards a school like Clemson that has become the standard bearer for ACC football and penalizes the conference doormats across most sports. Those latter schools are arguably lucky to be in a major conference and in an era that heavily emphasizes football.
I can provide whatever detail anyone wants behind these numbers, and again, my approach only uses athletics performance as the discriminator. It's perhaps a more straightforward and understandable model than one based on each school's market attractiveness. That would probably be a combination of simple market size and how much interest there is in each school. While maybe a more relevant metric--esp. considering Wake Forest ranks high on the above list!--it's pretty certain that ESPN would have to provide that analysis...
I used athletic performance as the sole determinant, and I calculated that in three components: football, basketball, and all sports. I applied a 70-20-10 weighting respectively to those three averaged over a three-year time horizon. (One bad year doesn't completely kill your payout.) Here are the current results in millions of dollars distributed...
The total and per-school payouts were obtained as estimates from this LINK projecting the ACC to receive a $30.9 million distribution per school for 2022. For example, the above table shows that U of L would have lost $1.4 million from its equal revenue share by adopting this unequal model.
It's unclear from what I could research, but Notre Dame appears to be paid from the ACC distribution per a formula that's not disclosed. In the model I'm applying here, ND received $6.4 million from basketball and $4,4 million from the all-sports component. Of course, they received zero from football. This model estimate coincidentally matches the payout ND received from the ACC the year before Covid (FY2020).
You can tweak this from 70-20-10 to make it even more heavily grounded in football. While helping Clemson, that would obviously impair the results even more for schools like Duke and Syracuse. The question is how much can you expect conference member schools to voluntarily agree to?
According to the Navigate link above, Big Ten schools are each receiving $57 million this year, and the SEC is receiving $54 million. Upping Clemson's payout to $47 million still lags what they would have received in either of those conferences. But considering their easier access to the CFP currently while playing in the ACC, it makes that pill easier to swallow.
It's interesting that the URS model here is not terribly impactful for the average school. Notice there's only $6 million difference between schools 3 and 10 on the list. It rightfully rewards a school like Clemson that has become the standard bearer for ACC football and penalizes the conference doormats across most sports. Those latter schools are arguably lucky to be in a major conference and in an era that heavily emphasizes football.
I can provide whatever detail anyone wants behind these numbers, and again, my approach only uses athletics performance as the discriminator. It's perhaps a more straightforward and understandable model than one based on each school's market attractiveness. That would probably be a combination of simple market size and how much interest there is in each school. While maybe a more relevant metric--esp. considering Wake Forest ranks high on the above list!--it's pretty certain that ESPN would have to provide that analysis...
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