[gocard14]

If your top properties want out, it may be hard or impossible to stop them in this setting. 

I agree with you that ideally the other schools should have done more but we don't know how feasible that would have been. If the other 8 schools told UW and UO to sign or leave, the 30 million deal maybe becomes a 15 million deal, or no deal.

I agree, but if that was inevitably going to happen anyway, better to know it sooner than later. The "mirage" of a 50 million dollar deal may have kept everybody in the fantasy world that it was all going to "work out". The remaining 8 schools would have been better off knowing that was the case 12 months ago, especially if it was going to be "no deal". That was for sure feasible.

We also don't know just how open B10 was to UW and UO before. It all happened pretty darn quick when it happened, didnt it. And the partial shares will become full shares soon.

As I understand it, UO and UW will get $30 million in 2024, increasing by $1 million a year until 2030 when they will begin receiving a full share of the purported $1.1 billion payout on a new deal to be executed in the future. $30m << $50M. Nobody knows what will be true in 2030, so expecting a very large payout then is a significant risk. IMO it happened fast because it was a "fire sale". Everybody wanted to bail and would take what was on offer. Utah and ASU didn't want to go to the BIG-12, but they had no choice. Robby Robbins at UofA was smart enough to see this coming and spent the year developing an option for UofA that by all rights they didn't "deserve". UO and UW took half shares (unlike USC and UCLA) because they had to.

The B10 were always going to have more money to throw around than Pac, in pretty much any media scenario, just based on demographics and time zones. Maybe unequal shares keeps SC and UW etc for a time but it still seems an unstable situation.

The biggest mistake IMHO for the PAC was not expanding sooner, but I admit I wouldn't have really been too keen on taking B12 schools like TCU or OK State at the time.

Agree that unequal revenue distribution as a permanent feature in any conference is going to be difficult to manage and probably unstable. It may work in an "up" market where the pie is getting bigger so everyone's share is getting bigger. It will undoubtedly not work when the pie is shrinking and everyone has bills to pay that they can no longer fund. Equal shares match a model where the revenue raised by the sport is incidental to the activity. When the revenue itself becomes the goal of the activity, that changes and all hell breaks loose. Here we area

I disagree about the inherent instability of unequal revenue sharing and would actually argue the opposite. As long as there are schools doing the heavy lifting in terms of eyeballs, prime TV slots, etc but getting the same money as Northwestern and Vanderbilt, there will be those thinking they can and should be doing better. In my view the rapidly growing pie has quelled these concerns. But once the pie stops growing and taboo/tradition have already been destroyed; it's anyone's game. Plenty of leagues (like MLB) have shown you can have unequal TV money and still compete.

I foresee a world in which there are 2-3 super conferences where revenue is divvied by a formula which gives all schools some baseline plus big bonus pay outs based on viewership, TV slot selection, etc. 

Ironically while this would be bad for northwestern and Purdue, it would be good for Stanford since it may reduce resistance to expansion of the big conferences since there would be less risk of dilution of the pie.

[gocard14]

If your top properties want out, it may be hard or impossible to stop them in this setting. 

I agree with you that ideally the other schools should have done more but we don't know how feasible that would have been. If the other 8 schools told UW and UO to sign or leave, the 30 million deal maybe becomes a 15 million deal, or no deal.

I agree, but if that was inevitably going to happen anyway, better to know it sooner than later. The "mirage" of a 50 million dollar deal may have kept everybody in the fantasy world that it was all going to "work out". The remaining 8 schools would have been better off knowing that was the case 12 months ago, especially if it was going to be "no deal". That was for sure feasible.

We also don't know just how open B10 was to UW and UO before. It all happened pretty darn quick when it happened, didnt it. And the partial shares will become full shares soon.

As I understand it, UO and UW will get $30 million in 2024, increasing by $1 million a year until 2030 when they will begin receiving a full share of the purported $1.1 billion payout on a new deal to be executed in the future. $30m << $50M. Nobody knows what will be true in 2030, so expecting a very large payout then is a significant risk. IMO it happened fast because it was a "fire sale". Everybody wanted to bail and would take what was on offer. Utah and ASU didn't want to go to the BIG-12, but they had no choice. Robby Robbins at UofA was smart enough to see this coming and spent the year developing an option for UofA that by all rights they didn't "deserve". UO and UW took half shares (unlike USC and UCLA) because they had to.

The B10 were always going to have more money to throw around than Pac, in pretty much any media scenario, just based on demographics and time zones. Maybe unequal shares keeps SC and UW etc for a time but it still seems an unstable situation.

The biggest mistake IMHO for the PAC was not expanding sooner, but I admit I wouldn't have really been too keen on taking B12 schools like TCU or OK State at the time.

Agree that unequal revenue distribution as a permanent feature in any conference is going to be difficult to manage and probably unstable. It may work in an "up" market where the pie is getting bigger so everyone's share is getting bigger. It will undoubtedly not work when the pie is shrinking and everyone has bills to pay that they can no longer fund. Equal shares match a model where the revenue raised by the sport is incidental to the activity. When the revenue itself becomes the goal of the activity, that changes and all hell breaks loose. Here we area

I disagree about the inherent instability of unequal revenue sharing and would actually argue the opposite. As long as there are schools doing the heavy lifting in terms of eyeballs, prime TV slots, etc but getting the same money as Northwestern and Vanderbilt, there will be those thinking they can and should be doing better. In my view the rapidly growing pie has quelled these concerns. But once the pie stops growing and taboo/tradition have already been destroyed; it's anyone's game. Plenty of leagues (like MLB) have shown you can have unequal TV money and still compete.

I foresee a world in which there are 2-3 super conferences where revenue is divvied by a formula which gives all schools some baseline plus big bonus pay outs based on viewership, TV slot selection, etc. 

Ironically while this would be bad for northwestern and Purdue, it would be good for Stanford since it may reduce resistance to expansion of the big conferences since there would be less risk of dilution of the pie.