SEC vs ACC revenue

SEC vs ACC revenue

"People are always comparing the ACC and SEC, and I promised to discuss financials this week, so... how does the ACC compare to the SEC in terms of revenue? If there is a money gap, how big is it?

Let me start by stating up front that some of these numbers are very difficult to get. Therefore, I'm going to analyze this 2 ways: first using best-guess data for the entire leagues (using data from various sources), and then I'll compare 2 comparable programs - Florida and Florida State - using USA Today published data.

Conference Estimates.
First, in order to get a feel for the numbers, let's look as some well-documented older data. Here is the breakdown from actual 2011 SEC records as reported by Forbes.com:

2011 SEC Revenues	Conference	Per Team*
TV + Other Production	$163,319,999	$12,563,077
Postseason Events	$92,757,645	$7,135,203
Sponsorship Royalties	$7,137,245	$549,019
Prior Year Events	$4,308,926	$331,456
Scholarships, etc	$4,245,946	$326,611
Investment Income	$1,293,765	$99,520
Totals	$273,063,526	$21,004,887

* in 2011 the shares were divided 13 ways: 12 teams + SEC HQ

Now I'm sure you guys want to see how the numbers look going forward; these are the estimated future revenue sources as reported by USA Today:

ESPN + CBS contracts: $21.43M per SEC school ($300 million total)

The SEC Network: $1.5M per SEC school ($21 million total)

Postseason football: At least $7.1M per SEC school ($100 million total)

$50M from the college football playoff [LINK]
$40M from the Sugar Bowl
$6M for each team in the playoffs (assume 1)
$4M for each at-large team in a New Year's bowl

NCAA and other revenue: $4M per SEC school ($56 million total)

$15.3M from the SEC football championship game (75K tickets @ $204 avg).

$5.0M from the SEC men’s basketball tournament (10K * 13 games @ $38.46 avg).

$35.7M from the NCAA men’s basketball tournament and other pooled funds.

TOTAL, per team: $34MNOTE: it appears that this number for the SEC championship game comes from ticket sales (75,000 X $204 avg); I will use the same assumption when computing ACC CG revenue below. 

With that in mind, let's look at estimated revenues for the ACC:

TV Contract: ESPN $18M per ACC team
ACC Network: $2M per team if there is no cable network
Postseason football: at least $5.8M per school ($87.5M+ total)
$50M from the college football playoff [LINK]

$27.5M+ from the Orange Bowl [3]
$6M for each team in the playoffs (assume 1)
$4M for each at-large team in a New Year's bowl

NCAA and other revenue: $6M per ACC school ($90 million total)

$4.6 M from the ACC football championship game (65K tickets @ $71 avg).

$46.8 M from the ACC men’s basketball tournament (20K * 13 games @ $180 avg).

$38.7 M from the NCAA men’s basketball tournament and other pooled funds (est).

TOTAL, per team: $31.8M

NOTE: There is a virtual reversal in terms of SEC football and ACC basketball revenues, but the totals are actually quite close, based on the best available data. If anyone has better data, please let me know.

Do these numbers hold up when comparing known tax return data? Let's compare UF vs FSU to see:

YEAR: 2012	Florida	FSU	DIFF
Ticket Sales	$23,580,698	$20,379,815	-$3,200,883
Contributions	$46,125,987	$31,000,624	-$15,125,363
Rights / Licensing	$42,120,499	$36,511,620	-$5,608,879
Student Fees	$2,420,030	$7,778,861	$5,358,831
School Funds	$1,936,427	$0	-$1,936,427
OTHER	$4,588,465	$4,378,524	-$209,941
Total Revenues	$120,772,106	$100,049,444	-$20,722,662
Coaching / Staff	$40,671,539	$27,504,602	-$13,166,937
Scholarships	$9,306,748	$9,542,715	$235,967
Buildings / Grounds	$17,613,294	$15,549,350	-$2,063,944
OTHER	$38,015,617	$37,682,211	-$333,406
Total Expenses	$105,102,198	$90,278,878	-$14,823,320

COMMENTS:

Rights / Licensing apparently includes TV media rights, apparel licensing, etc. This is conference money, if I understand correctly. The Gators have just over a $5M advantage here (less than 5% of the total, and our analysis above suggests that when ESPN either creates an ACC network or kicks in the extra $2M per year, either way, the gap should shrink), yet this gets the majority of the attention on the internet.

According to public data for last year, the SEC paid Florida $21.4M [1] while the ACC paid FSU $19.7M [2] (see notes below).

Ticket Sales and Contribution - both of which are largely affected by the undergraduate enrollment size - give Florida the majority of their revenue advantage: $18M. This is just a case of bigger schools having a built-in advantage over smaller ones, and if we are honest, this completely dominates the other numbers. Florida has 51,474 students while FSU has only 31,851 - a difference of nearly 20,000.

In fact, the only thing which really helps close that gap is the TV media rights fees, bowl payouts, etc.  As those numbers keep increasing, to some extent that waters down the ticket sale and contribution disparity.

Student Fees + School Funds - both of these are just another way of saying the school is helping to pay for athletics. Contrary to what you might think, it's not the other way around at most places.

I have no idea what's included in "other".

BOTTOM LINE:The ACC is very competitive with the SEC in terms of conference-controlled revenue. Attendance at the ACC football championship game is good, but ticket prices are nowhere near as high as SEC tickets. Still, the conference more than makes up for that with high demand for basketball tournament tickets, so that in the end, the revenue difference is probably no more than a couple of million dollars (2% to 3% of a school's total athletic budget). The big difference between SEC revenues and ACC revenues on a per school basis is tickets and donations - and the size of the school has more to do with that than being a member of a conference.
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[1] Missouri and Texas A+M each received [in total] about $19.5 million from the SEC, while the other 12 schools received around $21.4 million apiece, giving an average of 21.2M - LINK

[2] Excluding expenses owed to the ACC (i.e. "apples to apples with the SEC numbers"), FSU's revenues for the 2012-13 year from the ACC were $19.7M - LINK

[3] The Orange Bowl contract is complex, which makes it more difficult to calculate payout. The minimum it will pay to the ACC in a given year is $27.5M, but there are provisions which could cause it to pay up to twice that amount - $55M - in a given year. We may not know the truth until it happens."

http://csnbbs.com/thread-686551-page-2.html

Marge Schott
4/17/2014

"1. Ticket Sales/Contributions
For the sake of accuracy, in 2011 FSU had 41,710 students (31,851 undergrad). Not sure where you got 51,474. I'm seeing two different figures. One of 48,748 (doesn't specify undergrad) and another of 49,785 (33,513 undergrad).

While they do have more students than FSU due to some professional programs we don't have, a bigger issue is that they're 2 hours closer to Orlando, Tampa and all of south Florida than Tallahassee. Travel is just easier. They likely have more interesting home matchups due to SEC play than we do despite their notoriously poor OOC scheduling practices. And FSU's attendance still hasn't fully recovered due to the combination of the final Bowden years, coaching change, economy and awful home schedules the last few years due to WVU and the 8/9 conference game thing.

The general theme in regards to contributions is that since FSU restarted football just ~60 years ago and since we lack some of the professional programs UF has while simultaneously having younger programs in the ones we do have, the "matured, wealthy" donor base is still building up. I think there's some merit to that but I wouldn't ever expect FSU to catch UF given the current difference in enrollment and professional programs.

It's also important to note that FSU only hit $31M in contributions ($100M in revenue) in 2012 because it included 1-time gifts for the construction of our indoor practice facility that I think was in the ~$15M range. Last year revenue was $89M with $18M listed as not allocated by gender/sport (this might be contributions?).

2. Rights
The $5.6M discrepancy is mainly due to 3rd tier rights, I think. Their deal is worth $10-11M and ours is $6.6M. They signed theirs at the height of their football/basketball title runs and we had already been declining for a handful of years after our run in the 80s and 90s. I have no idea if they lost any value in their deal given the SEC buyback and if so, how much.

Where are you getting championship revenues from? Where are you seeing the Orange Bowl paying up to $55M?

I also think the SEC is likely to receive more bids to the playoff over time than the ACC, even if it's only something like 1.2/year vs .8/year.

The overall ACC vs SEC numbers look nice, but I'm just unsure on those championship/bowl payouts, which are significant. And what type of tv revenue raise did the SEC get after adding Mizzou and A&M?

3. School Funds/Student Fees
I'm not sure what school funds is as UF doesn't need the university to maintain their athletic budget. I do know FSU doesn't charge students for football tickets but UF does.

4. Other
Might it include concessions (if not in tickets) and apparel sales (speaking about at campus-owned/stadium-based stores, not fees generated from merchandise at malls/online, etc)? I'd imagine real estate holdings would also fall under this category. FSU's Boosters built an apartment building with ground floor retail and restaurants along with a separate building with restaurants/bars and a club near campus/the stadium and has plans to add additional buildings to the property as well. They're also building a Booster-owned dorm that will house "49%" athletes (basically just recycling athletes' "cost of living" costs through the dorm, right, and freeing up that otherwise already spent money on other items?). "

"UF has fluctuated above and below 50,000 for years now based on what I saw when I looked up their enrollment. Not sure what would explain swings of 3,000+ students over a few years period like that. I mainly just wanted to post their undergrad figure for a better comparison.

Donations have rebounded after taking a bit of a dive the last 5-10 years for the same reason attendance had been an issue. I expect there to be a nice increase this year in both ticket sales and contributions. It's the perfect combination of National Champs, Heisman Winner and great home schedule. I hope it's a $5+M jump in combined ticket sales/contributions but we'll just have to see. Anything higher seems unreasonable (10% increase is ~$4+M) and anything lower would be disappointing.

Those tier 3 rights include the rights all schools retain (except Pac 12?), such as websites, advertising, radio shows and tv coaches shows, etc. It's the same principle that people on here were using as to why FSU/Clemson wouldn't earn more tier 3 money elsewhere, because how much is a scrub football game and some scrub basketball games going to net you? Well, it'll definitely net you some money, but does UF keep the original yearly revenue, similar to how the Big 12 received the same total tv payout despite losing teams? Or did their contract actually decrease in value? I have no idea and doubt that's available online (FOIA would probably work). I'm sure as long as FSU maintains a high level in football that come the next tier 3 negotiations the current gap will close, but depending on which school re-ups first will also play a factor.

Assuming the ACC receives $55M those years just doesn't make sense to me. But I don't know what the alternative would be other than receiving the amount the ACC would typically receive in a given year vs Big Ten/SEC (or ND). Because the money teams/conferences receive from their semi-final appearance is an entirely different disbursement of money, right?

The SEC exchanging an increase in guaranteed tv payouts for SEC network bargaining power hopefully works to the ACC's benefit, but if the network does well it might create more revenue than the increased tv payouts alone would have. And the ACC could still be left at $20M. That USAToday article is screwy. It says the SEC's CBS/ESPN contracts work out to $14M/school with 14 schools, then goes on to say it's worth $21.4M, and then continues by saying $25M.

I now see where you got the SEC championship/tournament figures, I just have trouble believing the ACC makes that much more from basketball than the SEC does football and basketball combined. I'd imagine that revenue is more complex than seats by ticket price. Wouldn't it have to include sponsorship like with Dr. Pepper and whomever sponsors ACC basketball? "