Quote:
Originally Posted by Prison Bitch
Agreed.
But there’s a lot more hoops inventory. Kentucky basketball plays 3x the games Kentucky FB does. In aggregate it narrows the #s a lot. Plus FB has to go up against the NFL in the fall whereas hoops is a dead period or programming from Jan-March.
I ran the numbers a few years back from SportsMediaWatch and found about 850M viewers for college football season. 600M for college hoops (225m or so for March Madness alone. )
But those count too, and still it’s <1/2 of total eyeballs for a hoops season
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You bring up a valid point and I’m not disregarding that basketball has a national following for it. It’s just not THE main factor for all of these conference alignments.
It’s football-plain and simple. And the. Anything involving basketball is an additional bonus for the most part.
Texas and Oklahoma aren’t joining the SEC because they have a large following for basketball-they’re joining because of football. And football moves the needle for decision making. You have anomalies like Kansas, Kentucky, Duke, UNC where basketball still has a large national following that probably supersedes football, but it’s still not as large of a $ driver. as footbal.
KU won’t fall to the wayside like Kansas St. because of their basketball following, but from a department and revenue standpoint, having football not be a complete embarrassment for the last decade would probably benefit them more for the next conference wars(if there’s another one).