What's Your College Football Team Worth?

Interesting rankings.  Nice to see Ga Tech so high, but they need to start showing it on the field.  Surprised UNC isn't higher because I think they are a sleeping giant.  They can be as good as they want to be.  I have no idea how Iowa is so high.  Overall, the ACC lacks a top 10 power (no, ND does not count, they are not in the ACC until we all share revenue equally).

Article below is 2011 article, but great breakdown.

What's Your College Football Team Worth?





Is FSU Really The ACC's Most Valuable Team?

"My goal is to use data to assess the relative value of the various ACC teams and to determine whether FSU and/or Clemson are really ‘subsidizing' the Tobacco Road teams as many fans claim. The underlying assumption is that ESPN makes money from advertisers based on total viewership, so the teams with the greatest number of viewers should be valued at a higher level than the teams that don't bring in the same digital footprint."

"The goal is to determine the total number of fans who viewed each team's regular season Men's Football and Men's Basketball games in the 2011 season. By comparing total viewership across these sports, it should be possible to determine a team's relative value since advertisers ultimately pay for eyeballs, and fan demographics for ACC teams should be relatively constant (i.e. a NC State fan is not more valuable than a Maryland fan to an advertiser). "

"OK - now to the fun stuff. So, is FSU really the most valuable team in the ACC? According to the way that I'm considering a team's value, the answer is a pretty clear ‘Yes'. Here's a quick summary chart along with some key takeaways. I'll also provide additional data later in the post to clarify some of the points."



"Some interesting observations:

• Duke is roughly equal to the median level in the ACC for two reasons: (1) exceptionally poor football viewership; (2) majority of basketball's value is realized in post-season play which is not included in this analysis
• Boston College is very poorly represented because data is pulled from the 2011 season; BC football and basketball were both very bad last year
• Florida State's league impact on television in 2011 was likely greater than the combined impact of Maryland, Wake Forest, and BC across basketball and football
• The impact of FSU and Clemson is almost equal to the combined impact of the five lowest ranked teams in the ACC (BC, Wake, Maryland, UVA, NCSt)
• Despite message board rumors, it doesn't look like NC State would be a very attractive pick up in the short term for the SEC as it doesn't command a whole lot of viewership relative to its ACC peers; the same could be said for GT.
• If the ACC pursued revenue sharing as part of its revised deal with ESPN, it could be argued that based on teams' viewership values the TV rights could be fairly divided as follows ($ millions per year)"

"Using viewership as a metric for valuation, it seems plausible that FSU, Clemson, UNC, Miami, and VT are all underpaid relative to their positive impacts on the league. FSU may have a legitimate gripe with the distribution, particularly given the fact that Wake and BC were basically free riders last year. I'm sure this is where people will start asking questions about how I came up with the numbers, so here's a summary of some of the key outputs that you'll probably want to see:"





"Since ABC, ESPN, and ESPN2 are the most valuable networks, it should be pretty evident that the boys in Bristol think that FSU, Clemson, Miami, and VT are the conference's cash cows (at least for Football). For example, UVA only attracted 3 high-profile network games despite its strong season, and those were against the conference's premier teams (@ FSU, @ Miami, @ VT)."



"No surprise here - UNC and Duke dominate the ACC's ESPN basketball programming. In fact, the rest of the ACC really only gets on the mother channel when they're playing one of the two teams located along 15-501. For example, Maryland was on ESPN five times last year (@ Illinois, vs. Duke, vs. UNC, @ Duke, @ UNC). The same holds true for most of the other teams in the ACC. I was personally surprised to see that Virginia Tech had such a strong basketball following.

So, what do you guys think? Is FSU really almost twice as valuable as Duke? Are Clemson and FSU worth almost as much as the bottom half of the ACC combined? Am I making errors in how I'm evaluating the relative rankings?

More broadly, should football really be that much more valuable to advertisers than basketball? Did anyone realize that BC was such a dumpster fire last year? I thought they were supposed to bring the North East market to the ACC.... Guess not. Does that have any larger implications for the market footprint/eyeballs theory of Big 12, ACC, or SEC expansion?"