Rick Neuheisel broke it down very well on the ESPNU SiriusXM show he's on. This was a couple weeks ago after the UT/OU move to the SEC. His point was essentially that most of college football is leaving something like 16-25% of their potential revenue on the table because they have 2-3 out-of-conference games that are of ZERO interest to television viewers. Sure, you have the occasional cinderella upset, but outside of a very small hard core of fans, no one is interested in watching Alabama v. Mercer, or Nebraska v. South Dakota State, or Ohio State v. Tulsa (or Akron). Multiply that times the top, say, 20-25 "#BRANDS" in college football who have some general audience television draw, and you have 40-75 games a year that are worthless to Fox or ESPN. Totally worthless. They may be worth a lot to the hosting "big" school and the town around it in terms of ticket sales, restaurants, bars, hotels, etc., but for the TV partners who pay the bills, those games are nothing. Worse than nothing really.
The problem with Texas and OU was that, no matter how good Okie State or ISU is in a given year, their entire conference schedule outside the Red River Rivarly fell into the essentially worthless category.
Think of how Notre Dame overcomes this as an independent by scheduling a lot of other "#BRANDS" (USC, etc.)
What the SEC is doing is creating a conference schedule (that will likely go to 9 or 10) games with far more big, valuable games for ESPN and CBS, than any other conference can offer. Add 1 "good" out-of-conference game on top of that and that's why their new contract will be so valuable.
Rick went on to say that the B1G doesn't need to raid the PAC-12, Clemson and Florida State don't need to leave the ACC, and the PAC-12 doesn't need to kick out Oregon State or add Kansas State. Rather, to "combat" the SEC they need to create more valuable games from a television perspective. And, according to Rick, they can do that by a scheduling alliance. Then they renegotiate their own conference contracts based on that scheduling alliance. It is not a battle with the SEC. It's not even a zero sum game. All they need to do to keep up with the SEC from a revenue perspective is take 2 of the 3 out-of-conference games, or maybe 3 of 3 and schedule them against other major conference teams. Yes, they are not all good teams that will draw casual fans, but playing Washington State or Syracuse is a better TV game than playing Troy or Southern Illinois. By a lot.
The Big Ten and PAC-12 don't need to merge and lose their own conferences or kick out their lesser teams to do this as we now see. They just need to schedule each other.
Once we start seeing USC, UCLA, Oregon, Washington, and Stanford start regularly playing Wisconsin, Nebraska, Ohio State, Penn State, Michigan, and Clemson, Florida State and Miami, the value of each of their conference TV contracts will increase "BIGLY."
He was baffled why this doesn't get more attention because it is so obvious. It's like the idea of 2-3 OOC games being against "cupcakes" is so ingrained in the sport for major teams that no one thinks about it.
By doing this the B1G, PAC-12, and ACC are going to each create 24-42 more games involving two major conference teams. Of those, 15 are going to involve games where both teams are "#BRAND" which are marquee TV ratings games. It makes for FAR more big college football games all year round.
And it is mutually beneficial. The PAC-12 benefits from a USC-Michigan OOC game just as much if not more than the B1G. The ACC benefits from Florida State v. Nebraska than another game against Swofford.
This is a simple, elegant solution. It will box out the SEC unless they can squeeze in to one of the remaining single OOC games that will be left.
They say contracts will be honored, but schools will start buying them out to make this happen faster and more frequently.
It will really hurt the North Dakota State, Ohio, Ball State, etc. but that is the way it is. Likewise, the remainder of the Big 12 is going to be permanently relegated to AAC status. That is too bad, but no amount of creative thinking is going to give Baylor or Kansas State a bigger alumni base or a TV market that cares about them.
This alliance is a great idea and it leaves the conferences intact and stable. Olympic/non-revenue sports can continue with their conference schedules as normal.
Neuheisel thought of it first. (Say what you will about him.)
