6/28/2019 - David Benedict (SiriusXM Full Ride Interview) | Page 2 | The Boneyard

6/28/2019 - David Benedict (SiriusXM Full Ride Interview)

The Big East Men’s Basketball broadcasts average about 110k households per game.
 
Hoophound said:
I don’t remember the numbers, but more. People haven’t been finding FS1. That’s why FOX wants UConn.
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Makes sense.

Found a thread from 2018 on the AAC board:

AAC TV Ratings

AACbbs: The #1 Board for American Athletic Conference sports on the internet.
csnbbs.com csnbbs.com

Seems like the ratings are all over the place in the aac. Some games only had 30k.
 
Da_Aisijimo_Gou said:
Facetious remark? If not, simply naive or do you truly believe naming names of programs without signed contracts could somehow placate ignorant people? Prior to negotiations, possible arbitration or potential legal rumblings with the AAC, what’s the perceived benefit of such a premature disclosure? You’re joking right?
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I wasn’t serious, just wishful thinking. It would be nice if we knew our future opponents. All of us want that ASAP.
 
.-.
I think all parties would like to have an agreement or basic understanding by Monday July 15th when AAC football media days being in Newport. Boy that will be an awkward event for all. With our departure, time to swap this thing for crawfish in NO or something similar.

footballbowlassociation.com

FBS CONFERENCES ANNOUNCE 2019 COLLEGE FOOTBALL MEDIA DAYS - Coca-Cola Bowl Season

The 10 major FBS conferences will dominate the month of July as each stages its
footballbowlassociation.com footballbowlassociation.com
 
Hoophound said:
First of all, they aren’t going to pay a fortune for it. Second, they know that football will likely be respectable in the next couple of years because Randy is at least competent.

With a decent UConn team, it is well worth their efforts. Their requirements just aren’t that big. Remember, FOX averages about 110k per Big East basketball game broadcast. SNY would eclipse that for sure with our football team and there is nothing but upside. I’d expect a decent deal with accelerators for viewership.
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Describe a fortune???

I hold out hope that football and tier 3 gets them in the neighborhood of 4 million. Is that pie in the sky?
 
The $7M number is such a farce.

First, it’s not inflation-adjusted. Aresco signed an extremely long 12-year deal. The longer the deal, the lower the “real” payouts compared to the top-line numbers. $7M annually over 12 years works out to under $6M annually in real, inflation-adjusted dollars.

Second, it pushes costs of production onto the schools. As others have noted, these are significant - and they’d hit UConn particularly hard as we’d be the only school producing WBB games. If we wanted to continue to provide fans with high-quality coverage of all FB, MBB, and WBB games, we’d need to make a big upfront investment and pay a significant amount out of pocket for every game played on ESPN+. Figure that’s an extra $1M out of pocket annually (and given some of the ACC network coverage, that may be conservative). So we’re down to under $5M.

UConn says moving to the Big East will save us $2M in travel costs. So if we’re comparing the AAC to the Big East, take another $2M off the annual payout and we’re down to under $3M in value from the AAC media contract.

Lastly, you can’t ignore the fact that the ESPN+ business model involves double-dipping by taking content hostage and putting it behind a paywall for fans who are already paying for ESPN. Let’s say there are 500k UConn fans who would need to shell out $10/month for 4 months to see their favorite team. That’s a $20M tax that Aresco was going to let ESPN levy on UConn fans annually, in return for what we’ve established is a real “payout” of $3M to the school once you account for inflation and added costs.

Unconscionable would be the best word to describe that. There was no way UConn could go along with it. The Big East contract alone is worlds better. If SNY offered us $1/year for football, we’d still be millions better off.
 
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I rarely do this, but I will now.

After listening to this, I take back literally everything I have said negatively about this move. If we’re paying for production on ESPN Plus and still not making much, then the AAC TV deal truly is an absolute ripoff.

That’s a terrible deal. Only unpopular sports, new sports, new leagues do that. We’re basically paying to be on ESPN Plus. That’s insane.

It’s called a time buy. We basically have the same deal as Pro Bowling, Dune Buggy Racing and the AAF.

This is how ESPN actually makes a profit on Plus, their costs are passed on to the content provider.

To hell with ESPN and the AAC.
 
VAHuskyFan said:
The $7M number is such a farce.

First, it’s not inflation-adjusted. Aresco signed an extremely long 12-year deal. The longer the deal, the lower the “real” payouts compared to the top-line numbers. $7M annually over 12 years works out to under $6M annually in real, inflation-adjusted dollars.

Second, it pushes costs of production onto the schools. As others have noted, these are significant - and they’d hit UConn particularly hard as we’d be the only school producing WBB games. If we wanted to continue to provide fans with high-quality coverage of all FB, MBB, and WBB games, we’d need to make a big upfront investment and pay a significant amount out of pocket for every game played on ESPN+. Figure that’s an extra $1M out of pocket annually (and given some of the ACC network coverage, that may be conservative). So we’re down to under $5M.

UConn says moving to the Big East will save us $2M in travel costs. So if we’re comparing the AAC to the Big East, take another $2M off the annual payout and we’re down to under $3M in value from the AAC media contract.

Lastly, you can’t ignore the fact that the ESPN+ business model involves double-dipping by taking content hostage and putting it behind a paywall for fans who are already paying for ESPN. Let’s say there are 500k UConn fans who would need to shell out $10/month for 4 months to see their favorite team. That’s a $20M tax that Aresco was going to let ESPN levy on UConn fans annually, in return for what we’ve established is a real “payout” of $3M to the school once you account for inflation and added costs.

Unconscionable would be the best word to describe that. There was no way UConn could go along with it. The Big East contract alone is worlds better. If SNY offered us $1/year for football, we’d still be millions better off.
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Add to that, UConn would basically be subsidizing the rest of the AAC through plus.
 
gampelcrazies said:
I can’t understand why anyone would think this tv deal is good. The schools should gang up and fire Aresco. Guy doesn’t have a clue.
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Those other schools aren’t going to bother producing and televising soccer, WBB, etc. we would have. It’s much worse for us than the others.
 
ZooCougar said:
Add to that, UConn would basically be subsidizing the rest of the AAC through plus.
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Exactly.

(1) We’d have to incur much higher production costs than anyone else in the AAC. There’s two reasons for this: we’d be the only ones producing WBB, plus the general cost of services is much higher in CT vs other AAC locales (Florida, Texas, Oklahoma).

(2) Our fans would get hit with the biggest ESPN+ tax, given the size and geographic distribution of our fanbase, combined with the popularity of our women’s program.

So we have to pay more than anyone else to do ESPNs job for it, then our fans get extorted by ESPN more than anyone else’s for the very production work we are now being forced to do ourselves. We lose on both ends, and the rest of the AAC schools split the extra revenue among themselves (though to be fair, the deal isn’t great for them either).

Toss in the fact that we have the highest travel costs in the conference and it’s incredible that Aresco thought he could pull that over on us. It should have been obvious to him that there was no way we would go along with it, but he was too focused on his $1B number.
 
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