Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

One of the very best things about September is school starting again, so my wonderful children are no longer spending half of their day playing Legos in my office and trying to hijack my Twitter account. But the return of school also means the return of school-based communicable diseases, which they so helpfully share with me.

So I’ve spent the bulk of this weekend fighting off some sort of non-COVID flu thing, no doubt incubated in a sea of unwashed first-graders. Not the best condition for deep editing or Serious Professional Journalism.

But we (generally?) don’t take sick days here at Extra Points. So today is a great day for another READER MAILBAG. As always, I take questions on a rolling basis via email, BlueSky, Twitter, text messages, US Mail, etc. Today, it seems like a lot of folks are curious about realignment-type things. Can’t imagine why, right?

Reader The Fat Man asks,

When I talk about realignment, I’m talking about at all levels here, from the P4 to DIII. In my experience, conference realignment decisions are generally about the following metrics:

Obviously, the degree to which each of these considerations matters for a particular league can vary quite a bit. Nobody out there is going to somehow launch the Ohio Valley Conference into a billion dollar TV contract with NBC Sports, and if you’re pulling down hundreds of millions of dollars, well, maybe you aren’t quite so worried about booking a few longer flights.

I don’t want to say that having an awesome program outside of football and basketball doesn’t matter at all. If a school is selling tickets and winning postseason games in any sport, from soccer to lacrosse, it’s going in the conference realignment pitch deck. I am certain that Big Ten executives are very happy that Oregon and USC are great volleyball programs. But having a well-supported volleyball program isn’t going to make up for a deficiency in TV contract value, football, or anything else. It’s a nice to have, not a have to have…at least in the eyes of the presidents, suits and consultants that make these decisions.

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Reader Andrew Voodoo asks,

So I can’t speak to the exact process, because I have not seen the exact pitch deck or presentation given to prospective Pac-12 institutions yet. But I’ve interviewed enough commissioners and TV executive-type people that I think I can speak to this process at a high level.

Media rights projections are based on a lot of different variables…it’s not like there’s a big table somewhere where a quant can go “hmmm, these schools are likely to bring in X number of views, therefore the valuation is Y.”

In my view, the single biggest question that will shape what the Pac-12 media rights could actually bring in is what companies are expected to bid. ESPN, FOX, TNT, NBC, Apple, Amazon etc. all monetize their sports properties in different ways, so some inventory could be more (or less) valuable to one company than others. In general, the more firms are willing to make serious bids, the better deal a conference will secure. How many active bidders will be out there this time?

Consulting groups will look at who is projected to make bids, analyze market data on various programs (historical TV ratings adjusted for time slot and channel, athletic performance, alumni base, local TV market, fan base size and demographics, etc.), and calculate a range for a potential valuation. Last week, I wrote about Hawaii is hoping that gambling data could also play a role in future broadcast valuations. If Hawaii’s assumptions are correct, I suspect that the Pac-12 could also benefit on some level from deeper late-night inventory….and not just by adding Hawaii.

My assumption here is that Pac-12 officials think that a package centered around their current membership, plus a few teams in the CST (Memphis, Tulane, UTSA, etc.), would attract multiple bids between linear television and streaming, while undermining the inventory of other competitor leagues, like the MWC and AAC, thus giving their members higher TV payouts. I do not know enough right now to give an opinion about whether I think that’s accurate or not. Trying to answer that is on my long-list of to-dos for this week.

Okay, last realignment question for a second….

Reader Pale Dragon asks:

This is a good question.

Honestly, I was a pretty big fan of what former Boise State associate AD Mike Walsh proposed last year, a massive 24-team Super League that would have been split into three, eight-team leagues, bound together by a promotion and relegation system.

The initial proposal included programs like Cal, Stanford and SMU, along with various schools in the CUSA and WAC. Leading up to the proposal, I heard administrators at various WCC and Big West schools also kick around variations of western-based promotion and relegation systems, mostly centered around baseball and softball.

I understand the practical, emotional and logistical reasons why these sorts of deals almost certainly won’t happen…but I think if it ever did, western mid-major programs are the perfect place to give it a shot. I’m not sure if there is a perfect way to slice up the Pac12/MWC/WAC/Big Sky/WCC/CUSA/OMGBBQ into some perfectly reorganized model that protects some modicum of historic rivalries, makes travel reasonable and puts everybody in the best possible competitive situation. So rather than continuing to burn cash, jet fuel and political goodwill by constantly trying….why not let competition just sort it out?

If the dust settles, and you had a basketball league that, say, included Gonzaga, San Diego State, UNLV, Grand Canyon, Boise State, Colorado State, Utah State, Saint Mary’s, Wazzu and Oregon State, I think that’d be awesome. If in two years, New Mexico or UC Irvine play their way in and Colorado State or Saint Mary’s moves to the second division, I think that’d be totally fine too. And maybe San Jose State or Air Force ends up playing more games against Fullerton or Northridge, and that’s fine too! More competitive games for everybody.

Generally, I am against flying soccer and baseball teams from New Orleans to Portland, all in the hopes of squeezing maybe two million a year more out of the CFP in a few years. But I’m just a guy with a keyboard, not an AD with a payroll to meet. I completely understand why Tulane, Memphis or UTSA might sign up for that reality.

And now, a non-realignment question to wrap this up.

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Reader Pittpost asks:

I can’t think of any reason, structurally, why most schools couldn’t do that.

College football broadcasts are certainly prime territory for political ads, and national broadcasts and conferences mean that sometimes, you’re going to get political ads for races nowhere near where you actually live. We have at least one recent example of college athletes at Montana being offered NIL deals to promote political candidates, and any entity that runs programmatic advertising (social media, web ads, radio networks, etc.) is probably going to get political ads unless they explicitly forbid that advertising category.

So theoretically, I could see why a school, either themselves or with their multimedia rights partners, could decide to sell space on billboards, programs, scoreboards, etc. to a political campaign. But even though the money would be good, and I’m sure campaigns would be interested, I’d be surprised if schools decided to actually do that.

Because in the long run, it probably isn’t good business.

In a world where higher education is increasingly struggling to convince the public that it is relevant and useful to the entire community, why poke the bear by running an ad for a campaign? Will any money be worth the angry emails, complaints from fans, potential hurt feelings or appearance that the athletic department is endorsing a specific candidate or cause? Probably not! It’s in the best interest of athletic departments to try and sell tickets to everybody…why alienate potential fans of a certain political persuasion any more than you might have to already?

I think that’s actually a major reason why you don’t see many high profile college athletes doing political NIL deals or being especially vocal about political issues. It isn’t that they don’t have political opinions…it’s that they don’t want to alienate potential fans (or employers, GMs, etc.)

Everybody who sells ads, including me, understands that not all money is good money, and that campaign categories are more trouble than they’re worth. I turn down ads on a regular basis that I don’t think would be relevant or useful for my readers, and I’m sure schools do the same. In most cases, I’d have to think political ads fall into that category of just not worth it.

Unless somebody drops a big enough bag.

Okay, I’m going to go pound some more Emergen-C. I’ll see you again in your inbox soon. We’ve got some very cool news to share that you won’t want to miss…..