bobbk said:
Last year each Pac 12 school received $30M. Lets say WBB viewership accounted for 5% of all views. That's $1.5 million in revenue. What ever it is should be counted as revenue
However given The ticket sale income above that's $4 per ticket. There seems to be opportunity with ticket pricing
Good approach. Let me try a deeper cut. What matters, in terms of TV cash flow back to the schools, is advertising revenue. The ads for football and mens basketball games are completely different than the same old ads for everything else. One major exception I noticed last year, is a few Thursday night games between top women's basketball teams (the Ford game where they got destroyed by Oregon last year as an example). But the reality is almost all of women's basketball and everyone not football and men's basketball is filler on the Pac 12 network, and doesn't really draw much ad revenue.
There is very little Pac programming in Fox or ESPN that is not football or men's basketball.
Just to throw out some figures, the Pac 12 last year provided around $353 million in distributions. Which is slightly less than $30 million per school as noted in the above post. That does not mean the distributions came from viewership or TV.
The revenues for the Pac 12 are around $496 million, from which you subtract off Pac 12 expenses like salaries and overhead, and you end up with the $353 million in distributions. One could argue that $140 Million Pac 12 expense seems extravagant, but that is another discussion.
The problem with the $498 million number is that only $339 million acmes from TV. A substantial portion of the remaining revenues comes from football bowl money and men's basketball post-season play. Until recently the women's NCAA lost money.
Looking straight at the money a program brings to the table, even allocating TV money, may not be the way the go. Women's basketball is gaining popularity and so if you want to be well positioned for the future you have to invest the program now even if that means running deficits.
But if you this is a look into the money that currently goes into the business of Division I college athletics, it's a look at the sizable gender coaching pay gaps (I get that UConn's may be different but look at the revenue they produce) and lower investment in women's programs that occurs at athletic institutions throughout the country. Women's basketball at Cal has been the biggest financial loser, that even allocating some unrealistic number of the conference cash distribution to the program won't make much of a dent in the deficit. But the assumption is that investing in women's basketball program is good for the future, and to the extent important donors matter, is supported by certain important donors. Otherwise, why not make major cuts to the program?
