OkaForPrez
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If you read the article linked about Maryland going to the big, the sentence that stands out to me is"Maryland doesn't command an usually large following, but access to the Washington and Baltimore markets matter".
Plus their football wasn't that good and attendance was low.
Markets matter people.
There are no universal rules though which is why this is tricky. You basically have to first differentiate every move that's taken place so far as either proactive expansion or backfill acquisition.
The hurdles are much higher to jump in proactive expansion than in backfill acquisition. a BA move really only has to match or come near the TV value of the lost school to justify the move. If a school administrator doesn't have to vote through a significant reduction in their own revenues its a much easier call to make.
Markets have been big factors in proactive expansion only when conference television networks are in play. In these scenarios you only need enough critical mass to get your network into a market at the highest carriage rate possible to impose the TV tax on all people within that market. That's why NYC and DC were so important to the B1g but might not be as important to an ESPN partnered conference like the ACC or SEC where ESPN is already a base tier established channel. Its been a while since we discussed the BTN landing on the base tier in the NYC DMA but if that's truly happened we've probably lost that race. No matter how much we trumpet our best of the rest value to the B1G in terms of markets, if they already have NYC then Hartford New Haven is enough to justify a proactive expansion hurdle jump.
The ACC's proactive moves are a bit trickier to plot. They feel like they were carried out with the intention of destroying the big east outright as directed by ESPN with the value of the PA move coming as a result of the full out death of the Big East.
I think at this point the best hope for a PA move is the Big 12's requirement for a CCG. If that conference believes they need a CCG in order to be competitive for a spot in the CFP every year then the value equation for expansion has to include the opportunity cost of missing out on CFP $ every year. If the value of the CFP $ per school * the increased likelihood of making the CFP each year exceeds the revenue dilution due to acquisition that might be enough to move the Big 12 off its perch. Bowlsby unfortunately has indicated publicly coming out of the Big 12's winter meetings that they collectively haven't concluded this year to be their ongoing reality but rather just the way the year played out. Maybe 2-3 consecutive years of not making the CFP changes that collective mindset and get's the Big12 moving.