Saturday, March 20, 2010

What FB Conference Gets the Most Bang for its Buck?

Went through the 2009 football TV schedule to see who, in terms of the conferences and their TV partners, had the most national games televised. Here's my compilation of the results, with both the number of games and the percentage based on the number of games controlled by a conference

http://mattsarzsports.com/NationalTVFB.xls


I left ND, Navy and Army off this comparison because their numbers are all 100% since their home games are contracted to a specific entity.

Thoughts
  • I wasn't surprised that the Big Ten had the best deal far and away. Big Ten Network helps a great deal, particularly that every game is available nationally even when there are multiple games at the same time.
  • The SEC's percentage is a little lower than I thought, but the number could be 10% higher when you consider that the SEC Network telecasts reach over 2/3rd of the country through local stations in the southeast and regional sports networks in New York, northern California and Michigan.
  • The Big 12 had the largest number of primary cable games due to FSN, Versus and ESPN games, but very few secondary cable games.
  • The PAC-10 numbers may be somewhat skewed by including games on Fox College Sports because many of these telecasts are regionally produced games made available to FCS. Otherwise their numbers drop to 31 national games and 48.4% of games available nationally. Note that regional games produced by Comcast Sports Net (Cal, Stanford) and Oregon Sports (Oregon) were not available to Fox College Sports and were not counted here.
  • ACC had a lot of internet-only games and that decreased their stats a lot.
  • The Big East number could be one more ABC game higher, but the UConn-Cincy game reached only 46% of the nation and the telecast window was split three ways.
  • The MWC and WAC are a virtual dead heat. There is a difference at the regional level where the WAC has a limited number of regional games and many local telecasts. The MWC's mtn. network gets that conference far more regional coverage.
  • The Sun Belt continues to bring up the rear

3 comments:

jasgre2000 said...

Almost all MWC games are available nationally on the Mtn., which is available via DirectTV.

Unknown said...

Not knowing the facts about the MTN makes your analysis suspect.

I'm in North Carolina and I get to see almost all the BYU games. I know that's better than the Iowa States of the world.

Matt Sarzyniak said...

The reason I did not include the MTN is because the channel is a sports pack channel unless you live in a mwc state. Like you Ed I also purchase the sports pack to receive the MTN.