Should you care about a Big Ten/SEC TV ratings war?

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

Elevate your team's travel gear with a partner you can trust. Desert Cactus is an officially licensed licensee for more than 625 colleges and universities, meaning they already know your brand standards. They produce high-quality, durable acrylic luggage tags in the Chicagoland area.

Perfect for student-athlete backpacks and travel bags, their tags are fully customizable with athlete names, jersey numbers and specific sport designations. Get the professional look your program deserves from a proven industry partner.

For more information on bulk-order discounts, please contact Brad Schweitzer.

The Big Ten has now won three college football national championships in a row, by three different schools. With Indiana evolving from laughingstock to potential powerhouse, Ohio State and Oregon in annual championship contention and Michigan, Penn State and USC all with plenty of room to grow, the top end of the league is in as strong a position as its been since the 1960s. Maybe longer.

But one area where the Big Ten hasn’t dominated, despite having access to all those big alumni bases and TV markets and championship-caliber football? TV ratings.

Via the Wall Street Journal:

If you’re a more visual learner, here’s what that discrepancy looks like in chart form:

First, a thread from Michael Mulvihill, the Fox Sports president of insights and analytics:

Mulvihill also pointed to the fact that "the current SEC TV deal makes it easier than it used to be to find the best SEC games,” and Big Ten markets, broadly speaking, tend to be more engaged in professional sports than their SEC counterparts.

Flora Kelly, the SVP of research at ESPN, pointed to parity:

Parity was also noted in the WSJ story:

This gets at something I think may be getting lost in the “what conference is better?” conversation. There’s a difference between a conference having four or five elite teams and a conference being stronger from top to bottom.

Bill Connelly’s end-of-season SP+ rankings show the Big Ten was exceptionally strong at the top. The league had three teams (Indiana, Ohio State and Oregon) in the top four and nine in the top 25.

But the lowest-ranked team in the SEC, Kentucky, was 67th, with a SP+ score of 1.8. Seven Big Ten teams were ranked lower than that, including one, Minnesota, that won eight games. Four Big Ten teams (Michigan State, Wisconsin, Purdue, and UCLA) had SP+ scores worse than 80.

That’s been the critique of the Big Ten since the days of Woody and Bo, really … that it’s a “Big Two, Little Eight” sort of league. That isn’t exactly the case now, but the bottom end of the Big Ten stinks. It’s potentially worse than the bottom of even the ACC or Big 12.

That can make for lousy television, and it explains why it felt like Ohio State was playing Purdue seven different times over the course of last season. On the field, on a week in, week out basis, the SEC is still the superior football conference, even if the best of the Big Ten appears to be stronger than the top of the SEC.

I’m not a television industry expert, but I suspect there probably is a ratings boost if one league has all of their games on one family of networks and the other is spread out across three major networks, plus a conference network, multiple streaming platforms, etc.

But beyond that, my suspicion is that ESPN enjoys a particular sort of bonus thanks to its reach across other media platforms. ESPN isn’t just a broadcast network, of course. It’s also a huge sports website, it controls sports radio programming across the country, its personalities loom large on social media, and for good or for ill, it can drive the national sports conversation in ways that other networks can’t.

CBS owns the 247Sports message boards and has its own national college sports news desk, which can help amplify their CFB broadcasts. NBC, with apologies to Friend of the Newsletter Nicole Auerbach, really doesn’t have a similar infrastructure. The Big Ten doesn’t have access to the same multi-platform content support hype machine, no matter how well produced its conference network is. Over time, I think that hurts the league’s potential reach.

College football isn’t just something you broadcast on Saturdays; it has to be part of the DNA of your network, from shoulder programming to digital.

New York might be the largest TV market in the country, but plenty of smaller cities actually watch college football more often. Here were the top 10 college football TV markets last season, via USA Today:

So that’s seven SEC markets right there, plus an ACC market … then two for Ohio State. I don’t expect those cities to change that much year over year.

In the short term, I think the answer is no. The Big Ten’s TV deal is already signed, and the league is going to get those huge checks over the duration of this deal from CBS and NBC, whether the deal is profitable or not. The immediate financial trajectory of either league doesn’t change very much.

Over a longer term? It might matter. College football TV rights, across the board, depend on a variety of interested bidding partners in order to keep rights values growing. If the Big Ten deal doesn’t end up penciling out by the end of the contract, could CBS and NBC be theoretically less excited about forking over even more money for the next TV deal? I think that’s possible.

It’s also entirely possible that Apple, Amazon, Netflix or other new partners step in to fill the void left by conventional broadcasters, thus keeping rights fees competitive and growing. Buuuuut I’ve also been writing that nearly every year of my professional career, and it hasn’t really happened yet in college sports. There’s a chance it never does.

TV ratings that don’t grow may also make it even harder for the Big Ten to potentially expand again. Recently, Purdue athletic director Mike Bobinski threw some cold water on this idea, pointing to the difficult math of a huge league:

If the new guys aren’t growing TV audiences, and they’re not all even getting full revenue shares yet, how does the TV pie grow enough by adding other programs? Utah, UNC, Miami or some other school might make exciting message board fodder, but nobody in the Big Ten wants to agree to smaller TV checks.

But those are problems for the future, not right now. And Mulvihill might be right. If these trends on the field continue, eventually popular perception will match reality, and the casual fan might be more interested in watching Illinois instead of Missouri.

The Big Ten apparently doesn’t want to let ratings measure the success of its coast-to-coast expansion program. Via the WSJ:

My response to that quote would be a giant fart sound, followed by an exasperated “come onnnnnnn.”

The expansion was about money, not about somehow capturing more access to the University of Washington’s research grant pool or interlibrary loan system. That’s how it ultimately will be evaluated.

There’s still a long way to go before that story is written. But right now, it looks like the Big Ten has some work to do. Getting Purdue, Maryland and Rutgers to improve would go a long way towards matching the SEC in the competition for eyeballs.

But for everybody else? That sounds like a future problem, not a present one.