Conference revenue gap and coming realignment?

http://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/19743196/why-2023-next-big-date-conference-shuffling

Expansion carries risk, but so does falling behind in revenue. No league will catch the SEC and the Big Ten, so schools not in those conferences must assess whether they can live with the gaps. A recent Detroit News report, which showed that Michigan expects to receive $51.1 million from the Big Ten in 2018, made waves around the industry.
"I got my glasses to make sure I read it right," said an athletic director in another Power 5 conference. "That's a big number. [The Big Ten has] been out ahead of the network curve for quite some time. They were the first to the market and created the market, so we're all trailing."
The SEC is the current revenue leader, distributing more than $40 million per member in the last fiscal year. The length of the ACC's rights agreement -- and the launch of its own network in 2019 -- suggests it could be quiet come 2023.
So it might come down to the Big 12 and Pac-12.
The Big 12 is still perceived as the most vulnerable, as Texas or Oklahoma could cripple the league by leaving. But revenue totals are encouraging -- its 10 members will split $348 million from the 2016-17 academic year -- and the internal squabbling that has plagued the conference seems to have disappeared.
"We've never been more resolute and more united as a group," TCU athletic director Chris Del Conte said. "When we signed that grant of rights and we committed to a 10-team league, every decision we made is phenomenal for us in all of our sports."
The Pac-12's forecast, meanwhile, is less encouraging, and its revenue gap with other Power 5 leagues will widen before the next rights negotiation. Cal's athletic department lost $21.7 million in the 2016 fiscal year. Although the Pac-12's geography and tradition suggests members won't be looking to leave, something needs to shift before 2023.
As an industry insider said, "The Big 12's making strides, while the Pac-12 is falling behind." Another asked, "Can other conferences take advantage of the Pac-12?"
Although leagues say things are quiet now, there's plenty of behind-the-scenes strategizing. Weiberg, who worked for various conferences from 1989 to 2014, said the biggest change he saw was how individual schools focused more on television revenue distributions.

 

"Everybody watches it -- it's reported prominently," he said. "Athletic directors get concerned about gaps. If you were to have a situation where the rights would be flat or, in worst-case scenario, in some decline, these institutions have lot of expenditures that are sort of locked into the future: facility debt, the cost of operating the program, coaching salaries. One constant theme in college sports in the last 30 years has been the need to have some significant growth.