FanPost

Football Revenue: SEC vs ACC

Sam Sharpe-USA TODAY Sports

It's high time for another fan post...

The ACC and the SEC compete in just about everything: football, basketball, baseball... and revenue. Since joining the ACC, Va Tech has been drawn into this ACC/SEC competition as well.

Now, it's been widely publicized that the SEC expects to be raking in around $34M per team, per year in the College Football Playoff era. That's more money than most of us can even comprehend. But you may ask: what about the ACC? If our league is behind financially, by how much?

Let me say that this information is not so easy to come by. Oh, sure, there are press releases and some data must be released publicly by law, but there are so many ways for these athletic programs to report the exact same thing that it can be very confusing. So I've done extensive research and calculations to try to get as close as I can to the truth of the matter, and this is what I came up with:

  • The SEC projects about $34M per year per team, while
  • the ACC projects about $30M per year per team.

That's pretty close, to be honest, especially when we are talking about $100 million/year budgets. (NOTE: If you want to see my data and calculations, please click here for the full article).

One word of caution: this is not to say that every ACC team will be $4M per year behind every SEC team. The fact is that conference payout is just one of many revenue streams, and not the biggest either. Ticket sales and contributions are #1 and #2 (and not necessarily in that order), so the final situation for any given program can vary greatly.

Can the ACC match the SEC in terms of payouts? Probably not right away, but this analysis indicates that the conference can stay very close until it's time to renegotiate the big TV contract, at which time who knows what will happen?

(just thought I'd share)

Editor's Note: Nice work, Mark! Everyone please click on his link above for more, it's worth your time. Well-researched.

FYI. The link is a bit wonky, so down the left side there is an option for SEC vs ACC. That is where the good stuff is.

--Flyers13

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