Panther247 Board

YES will get a rates bump from who? That's not the point. The point is whether the Yankees get compensated for devaluing their share (wether it is 20% or 51% makes no difference) by allowing it to be bundled. That compensation would come from the BTN.

You seem to be buying the numbers the B10 was selling to Maryland at face value. That might come to pass, and it might not. BTN may be bundled with YES, or it might not. Either way, it is going to be a major struggle to get the BTN into NYC. A handful of bad Rutgers games is not going to have any influence over it at all. Everyone seems to admit that. YES bundling could help it get on, which is what everyone already seems to also admit. So think about that. Really, if the added value to the BTN comes almost entirely from packaging it with YES, than adding RU really did nothing more than add another mouth to feed.

I'm not buying the numbers that the Big Ten was selling. I think it is a bit of fantasy. But still, if they achieve half the increase that they sold MD on, that is quite a bump.

The bump will come from the cable companies who get strong-armed into a rates increase. Maybe they will only get $0.70 per sub like they had to settle for with Philly, but they will get a decent rate on the standard tier with YES driving the deal.

They need a school to be in the market in order to ask for a premium price (regardless of how terrible that school is).

ACC schools, collectively, are ahead of the Big Ten, collectively, in undergraduate metrics by rankings (US News) and admissions (eg SAT). That took a hit when swapping Maryland for Louisville, but the ACC still comes out ahead.
http://pitt.247sports.com/Board/59427/ACC-is-still-the-academic-king-of-the-power-conferences-14530768/1

On the undergrad end, you have Duke, ND, BC, UVA, Wake, Georgia Tech, and UNC all in US News' Top 36. Now, I'm not fan of US News, but it is inarguably the biggest measure of perception and the biggest determinent of undergrad academic perception in the US. With those 7 schools, the ACC is by far the best of any major athletic conference. Throw in Miami and you have 8 schools with average Reading+Math SAT admission scores over 1300.

The Big Ten, in comparison, only has 3 such schools over 1300 and only two schools in the US News Top 40. But as I said, it doesn't really matter. It is a secondary consideration, and even in that, not really impactful. What ever advantage the ACC has here is only a marketing talking point, and they don't even wield it very well based on the statements of B10 fan boys running around declaring out the CIC as some Ivy League of football crap with seldom a retort of US News or SAT scores from the ACC media or fan boys. The B10 is clearly not as good as the ACC by these measures, but the B10 clearly better at mobilizing legions of believers armed with its marketing copy.

Research wise, affiliation with schools in conferences does absolutely nothing for attracting graduate students, postdocs, faculty, or research dollars to universities. It is nothing more than a talking point in a brochure for the conference. Clearly, the institutions of the B10, on average, do more R&D though. But no one is picking their grad school or faculty position based on conference or CIC or ACCIAC. No one is getting $1 in extra research money because of it.

Purchasing consortium wise, this would be a benefit. Mainly for the institutional subscriptions to journals or software licenses. I can't imagine it would be that hard for the ACCIAC to pursue setting up, although there are quite a few differences in institutional profiles....but I'd love to see what the actual numbers are for the CIC members' actual savings. That said, Pitt's library already belongs to purchasing consortiums. I think most academic libraries do these days.

From Pitt's perspective, nothing will ever even remotely approach the collaborations it has with Carnegie-Mellon (I actually don't know of two such thoroughly collaborative institutions anywhere else in the world...institutional walls simply disappear some places), so none of this really matters because conference affiliation does not impact real world collaborations at that level one bit. But in the hypothetical, being in a league with Duke and UNC is no different than being in a league with Northwestern and Michigan. I mean, really, on the research end, the only schools ahead of Pitt in R&D expenditures in these two conferences are Michigan, Wisconsin, and Duke. The ACC is getting more of a bump, research perception wise, from Pitt joining than Pitt could be hypothetically getting in return.

Let me put it this way, if the CIC is so good at promoting research among members, why has Penn State's standing dropped compared to peer universities since it joined the CIC? According to NSF reports, in FY 1990 Penn State R&D accounted for 1.57% of total R&D funding among US colleges and universities (or 9th out of all colleges and universities in the US). In FY 2010, the latest available numbers, Penn State R&D was 1.27% of total academic R&D spending or #15 nationally. (In addition, since 1996 when US News began individual school rankings past 25th place, Penn State has dropped from #41 to #46 this year.) In comparison, ACC member Georgia Tech remained steady at 1.0% over the same time period, while Pitt rose from 0.72% (#34) to 1.34% (#11). I guess that makes the Big East conference the most academically elite research organization in the world! Bottom line, neither the CIC nor the ACCIAC nor SECU nor the AAU nor anything but the institution itself enhances the real world academic or research prowess of said institutions.

It is, and that's why it is going to be more trouble than they think..

Look, it worked in other markets, like recently in Nebraska. Delaney, or someone, has already alluded to or leaked the approach of threatening to withhold UMD and RU games from cable like he did for UNL in order to pressure them onto the cable there. They'll laugh in his face if they try that in NYC or DC.

If Fox wanted the BTN on everywhere, they'd bundle it with Fox News.

But the concern for the ACC might be that leveraging RU (and potentially YES) to get the BTN on in NY proves to be such a failure, that it spurs the Big10 to nab Syracuse and maybe even UConn. For Pitt, being shut out of a conference with PSU, SU, RU, UConn, and MD would be bad....and it would be bad for the ACC too. But, the ACC's ace is ND, and the latest leaks coming from ND have any validity, it sound really good for the ACC. Rumors are that they're already being pressured by ESPN to add a sixth ACC game (and that could mean annual ND games for Pitt and BC).

Honestly, if ND joins full time, and I think that is a possibility if the playoff go to 8 teams with conference champion autobids, I think anyone is in play for #16. It's fairly obvious the ACC was holding a spot for PSU or Rutgers before MD took off. At the hypothetic point that ND joins in full, MD could really be kicking itself, big time.

You consider an unnamed source to be a reliable source and B12 fans are FOS? Step away from the ACC Kool-Aid, Pollyanna.

An unnamed but very reliable source just told me that the ACC is about to finalize its Grant of Rights.

An unnamed but very relaible source just told me that Maryland, after reviewing Big 10 finances and ACC finances, decided that they were very close but was willing to risk a $52,000,000 exit fee in spite of its financial troubles.

An unnamed but very reliable source just told me that ND's partial membership in the ACC will help it as much as it helped the Big East.

An unnamed but very relaible source just told me that the ACC hopes that tickets to next year's ACC championship game go for at least $5 on Stubhub.

I heard the upper deck seats at the Big Ten title game were empty and there were like 25,000 people in attendance .. despite the 40,000 tickets sold.

Seriously .. do you know what the attendance numbers were? Tickets sold AND actual attendance?

I didn't watch either game. I was just told (by a rare Pitt/PSU fan) that nobody showed up for the Big Ten game.

No we have a Baylor fan over here talking smack. The Rutgers of the South. Baylor, imagine that.

Pssst.... your average for the ACC is wrong in your thread. It should be 59.7, not 55.7. That means that the Big Ten has a better average. However, we aren't comparing the ACC to the Big ten, we are comparing the ACCIAC to the CIC. In that case, you should include the University of Chicago in your rankings. The University of Chicago is #4 in the US News rankings which then drop the CIC average down to 54.73.

As for the savings, the CIC claims to have saved it's members $15.3 million in 2010-2011. Netted against $2.2 in membership dues, that means that it's 13 members saved about $1 million per school. In the grand scheme of things, that's a very small percentage of their budgets. TIFWIW.

EDIT: In regards to Penn State, they have grown their research dollars, just not at the pace of other schools. They are starting to get their medical school up to par, so you should see that number increase. As I said before, the CIC's impact is overblown... you aren't telling me something I don't know. Still, it is the best organization of it's kind.

You are right, I apologize. I forgot about ND

So the CIC is only ahead by 1.0. Let's be honest here, we are really splitting hairs.