Big Money to be Made in ESPN College Football Contract Over BCS Earnings
The countdown has more than begun. The next college football season in 2013 will be the last year for the BCS.
In 2014 the new 12-year contract with ESPN for the 10 FBS-level conferences will go in to effect. According to USA Today Sports, an anonymous source (due to subject sensitivity) gave them the information that about $400-600 million will go to these 10 conferences annually…and that’s not including the sales coming from tickets and merchandising from the championship game.
Since this revenue is going to be drawn out over the 12-year contract, numbers on how much goes to whom are yet to be decided. It’s being estimated that the revenue total will actually be less than $400 million during the first year but will progressively grow throughout the life of the contract to up to $600 million for the last year of the contract in 2025.
After expenses, here’s an estimated list of how the annual revenue is planning to be split:
- “Power” Conferences – 71.5%
- “Group of 5” Conferences – 27%
- Notre Dame – slightly less than 1%
- Remaining FBS Independents – .5%
To give a brief idea on about how much revenue that could end up being, we’ll use $500 million as an example figure. After all expenses taken into consideration, about $350-375 million would be left to spread across the 10 FBS conferences (not including revenue from the contracts with the Rose, Sugar and Orange Bowls). Read the rest of this entry »