📡 SEC Football Isn’t Winning Titles. But There’s One Way It’s Still Crushing the Big Ten. - The Wall Street Journal

[SEC Sports]

https://www.wsj.com/sports/football/sec-big-ten-tv-ratings-69025ef6?

Two years since the two athletic conferences aggressively expanded, the SEC’s TV audiences are surging ahead of the Big Ten’s​

There is no question which conference is the reigning king of college football. Indiana’s spectacular national title this week was the third in a row by a Big Ten team, after Michigan and Ohio State.

But when it comes to the long game, the Southeastern Conference is still leading by at least a couple of touchdowns.

Two years ago, SEC and Big Ten football games drew similar television audiences. This season, however, the second campaign since each league expanded, the SEC’s average audience has surged by 49% while the Big Ten’s has dropped 11%, according to Nielsen. The average regular-season SEC football game now draws 2 million more viewers than the average Big Ten game.

And in an era where football broadcast revenue is the lifeblood of college sports—particularly as teams spend millions on their rosters—that growing gap has become the true measure of the business.

“Right now, based on the differential in viewers, the SEC arguably is the more valuable property,” said Neal Pilson, former president of CBS Sports.

The Big Ten rejected the notion that TV ratings were a sign that the SEC has gained an edge. “To simply measure the success of our conference’s expansion by television ratings is to ignore academics and research as the primary purpose of institutions of higher learning,” a Big Ten spokesperson said.

But the ratings chasm also helps explain the Big Ten’s urgent push to double in size the College Football playoff to 24 teams. A larger playoff would keep more teams in the title hunt for longer, which the Big Ten hopes would be enough to boost interest in regular-season matchups. (A decision on potential expansion as early as next season is expected on Friday.)

The SEC would prefer a more modest expansion to 16 teams, in part to preserve the drama of its regular season and protect the valuable SEC championship game.

Whichever way the decision breaks, it’s clear that the agendas of college sports’ two ruling conferences carry more weight than ever. A memo of understanding signed by other conferences in 2024 gives the Big Ten and SEC the final say on the format of the playoff, whose broadcast rights are worth $1.3 billion a year.

Currently, the Big Ten has the more lucrative TV package, which has helped fund its on-field success in the player-pay era. The Big Ten distributed roughly $62 million to each school as of 2023-24, compared with about $52 million in the SEC.

And while that gives the Big Ten an advantage in the near term, several years in a row of larger audiences for the SEC would be a strong argument for a heftier broadcast deal when the rights come up for renewal after the 2033 football season.

It was the quest for more TV revenue that in large part drove the Big Ten and SEC to expand in 2024. The Big Ten added four West Coast football teams far from its Midwest roots: Oregon, Washington, USC and UCLA. The SEC stayed close to its current conference map, adding Texas and nearby Oklahoma.

“Jumping outside the footprint wasn’t the right direction,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said in an interview.

Since expansion, SEC games are more competitive, making for better television. The average margin of victory this season was 11.5 points, the tightest in nearly two decades, according to Stats Perform. The average margin in Big Ten games, meanwhile, was nearly 17 points, slightly up from two years ago.
SEC football also jumped to 4.9 million viewers for regular-season games compared with 2.8 million in the Big Ten.

Sankey attributes the SEC’s audience increase to its ardent fan base and a 2024 change in TV partners from CBS to Disney-owned networks ABC and ESPN, which increased the number of games airing on broadcast TV. Stacking SEC double- and triple-headers on ABC also helped build audiences, as opposed to Big

Ten games shown across several different networks.

And soon, the SEC will have even more valuable inventory to offer ABC and ESPN. Next fall, each team will play nine conference games, up from eight.

 

[Rolltide24]

Read that yesterday. We don’t win the trophy, but we command a lot of eyes and make a lot of money.

 

[alabama mike]

Time to get back to winning the trophy and continue to win the money.