In Year 1, SEC Network already printing money for league schools

ACC is screwed.


In Year 1, SEC Network already printing money for league schools


"The SEC may have had a rough go of it with the high-profile games in the 2014 postseason, but fiscally the conference is still rolling in it.
The “it,” of course, is money, something that the league has essentially been printing over the last several years on the football side. An additional printing press was added last year with the launch of the SEC Network.
That endeavor, though, wasn’t expected to realize a profit until at least Year 3 after the launch. A funny thing happens with projections sometimes: they’re off. Way off in this instance.
During a meeting with both the media and the Intercollegiate Athletics Committee Friday, South Carolina athletic director Ray Tanner revealed that the SEC Network is expected to pull in a profit of $5 million its first year — per school. And even more to the point seven months after the network’s debut, Tanner called that $5 million per school figure as “conservative.”
In other words, it completely blew the pre-launch projections completely out of the financial stratosphere.
“This is my third academic year, so I was on the ground floor when (the idea of) the SEC Network was launched,” Tanner said according to Rivals.com. “Right after I became AD this was formulated in our meetings that we were going to do this SEC Network. So, I was there from the beginning.
“You sit there and listen to the proposals and programming going forward and the dollars involved, but as they said, it could be Year 3 before we realized any financial gain. But when we launched and distributors started getting on board, we said maybe two years. Before you knew it, we had enough to realize a profit in Year 1.”
The recruiting website writes that, “[i]f the $5 million figure holds, each SEC school should expect a payout of approximately $26 million when the league conducts its annual spring meetings in Destin, Fla., in late May.”
In 2014, the total revenue distributed by the SEC to its members schools was $309.6 million. That broke down to an average of $22.1 million per school, over $8 million more than was distributed per school five years earlier ($13.8 million in 2009).  Thus, in a span of just six years, the SEC will have nearly doubled the annual payout to its membership — a payout that will do nothing but grow moving forward.
It was expected that, within a handful of years, the SEC Network would add low eight-figure sums into each member’s coffers. Based on the roaring success the network has been thus far, it might be time to speed up that projection as well."