Media Matters: 2015-16 Post Season

In Part One of this series I looked at how Tier One inventory was created and how it performed over the past several years, then followed it up with Part Two and Three, which covered Tier Two and Three inventory respectively.   I will reference aspects that were explained in that article within this analysis, if you have not yet, please feel free to start with the first:

Media Matters: Tier One Analysis

Media Matters: Tier Two Analysis

Media Matters: Tier Three Analysis

The post season is a bit of a different animal because most of the games are shown on ESPN and each conference negotiates its own bowl match ups.   Power Five conferences are paid more for their participation due to the exposure they bring the bowl, in ticket revenue, and the network partner in TV audience.  However, it doesn’t really matter who ends up as a home team and who is a visitor.  Unlike the regular season the numbers are about total exposure, not how it appears on a media contract.

Before we get to all of the bowl games, let’s take a quick peak at how the post season started, conference championship games.   Because they are completely different beasts than regular season games none of the conference championship games (CCGs) appeared in the regular season analysis, outside the Big 12 games referenced below.

Championship weekend focuses a lot of eyeballs in a few key games over a couple inventory slots.  Where a typical Saturday may have 30 games spread out over multiple channels, championship weekend has a third of that, all on Tier One and Two channels.

Due to the expanded audiences this single game can create for a conference, with there being two good teams guaranteed in the match up and something on the line, they tend to be worth a lot more than a typical regular season game.   The Power Five schools can net between $18-25 million for the single game alone.   That’s about four to five times the amount of a regular season Tier One game.

Here is a graph showing the breakdown of the championship week audiences by the eight conference championship games.  For comparison purposes, I also included two regular season games out of the Big 12 that appeared the same Saturday.  The columns in yellow represent games on Tier One channels and the ones in blue represent games on Tier Two channels.

The SEC continues to dominate the conference championship audiences.  It is a rare year when they are not either at the top or in a battle for the top spot.  Generally they are always advancing two teams into the final game where the winner will continue to play on for a national title.   This is what creates large audiences; high winning percentage teams playing with their season on the line.   In this year’s case, Alabama would have dropped out of the national title hunt with a loss, shaking up the entire playoff picture.   Not everyone watches to see someone win.

The Big Ten came in second with the ACC in third.  The interesting aspect to this is that the Big Ten lost some audience from the prior year because they didn’t have a “blue blood” team in the title game.   Iowa vs Michigan State isn’t as interesting as Michigan or Ohio State playing for a title.  The ACC had a similar issue, featuring the number one team in the country with Clemson, but lagged back due to Florida State not appearing in the game.

The rest of the championship games were mediocre in comparison, though I found it interesting that the AAC championship game, which was broadcast at noon eastern on ABC, did slightly worse than the Pac 12 championship game, which was broadcast on ESPN on prime time.  To make matters worse for both conferences, the Texas/Baylor game for the Big 12, which was broadcast on ESPN opposite the ABC game at noon, out drew the AAC championship game.   Three teams from Texas, one playing for a conference title, and nearly twice as many people turn into the other two playing each other, one of which has a losing record.   I also included the West Virginia vs Kansas State game on here, which didn’t draw well, but it was also the only game of the day on FS1 and competed directly with the SEC championship game in the mid-afternoon.

When looking at all the games performed, especially against extra regular season games that had no bearing on the post season, it is easy to see that conference championship games are not the home runs many believe them to be.   While the Big 12 would likely benefit from a big match up and could double the size of its audience that week, some years the game will stall like the Pac 12’s did this year and the ACC and Big Ten’s have stalled in past years.  When they win though, they payoff is far greater than any regular season match up.

If conference championship games produce large audiences, they pale in comparison to the biggest of the bowl games, especially the national championship game.  All in all, 205,586,000 people watched 39 bowl games this year, or 5.2 million viewers per game.   The bulk of those, however, were the Playoff Bowls, e.g. the New Year’s Six (NY6), which averaged 14 million viewers a game.   The non-NY6 average was 3.35 million.   That is approximately the same amount as the regular season Tier One averages.
Championship game aside, most bowls build in audience the closer the get to New Year’s Day, which still features the strongest bowls of the season.   The Rose Bowl has held the title of “most watched bowl” for decades with its consistent marketing, big conference match up, and perfect time of day to capture the bulk of the college football audience on New Years Day.   Even with Stanford blowing out Iowa this year the game remained the largest non-playoff audience.

The Sugar Bowl typically has the second highest audience, with the Prime Time New Years Day slot, but this year’s match up featured two schools who were both out of the Top Ten in #12 Mississippi vs #16 Oklahoma State.  Considering Mississippi won by four touchdowns didn’t help keep the audience around either.  That is one of the major reasons why there is fluctuations in bowls from year to year; close games by highly ranked teams get more audiences while blow outs by lower ranked teams lose audiences.   Matter a fact, games that featured a ranked upset (e.g. a higher ranked team losing) averaged over twice the audience this year as games that didn’t.

Over all though, the combined winning percentage of the two teams playing is the key indicator on if a bowl game will be watched by the masses or not, much like was shown in the regular season analysis.  It isn’t a coincidence that the teams with the best record also play in the bigger bowls that are closer to New Year’s Day.   That’s typically when people are home at a time branded over generations to watch college football.

For those who didn’t read the rest of the analysis, Combined Winning Percentage is, quite simply, the total winning percentage for the teams on the field.  If one team is 10-2 and the other is 9-3, then the Win Percent is 79.2%.  For this post season, audiences didn’t begin to show up in significant numbers until the combined winning percentage for the game was above 80%.  Prior to that threshold the games are watched by either fans of specific teams playing or by more hard core college football enthusiasts who will take any college football game over none at all.   The casual fan, however, needs a reason to show up.  Usually that reason is watching two heavyweights battle it out on the last game of the season.

If you are wondering why the playoffs are worth so much money that is why.   It guarantees that you have the four best teams playing each other for a shot at the title.  It not only has the drama necessary to get people to watch, it has the juggernauts of the sport that year.   No one gets a bye or a low seed.   Only in the best situation, e.g. all the top seeds win, does an eight team playoff produce what the current version guarantees yearly.  Because of that it will always be worth less.

While it was a big story this year, I’d not read too much into the Semifinal games being down 40% from last year.   First, last year they had the two best slots for the games, the Rose and the Sugar.   The Rose and the Sugar, not to mention the Big Ten, Big 12, Pac 12 and SEC, are not giving up their choice spots for the playoff.  Everything will fall apart first and revert to the old system before that happens.  This was built into the system and their goal is that, over time, New Year’s Eve will start to become closer to New Year’s Day in regards to viewership, because of these big games with high combined win totals shown above.   It won’t happen in a year, it likely won’t happen in a decade, but 20 years from now you likely won’t see as significant of drops as you did between one and two.   As the saying goes, one data point doesn’t make a trend.

The question I tend to get most are “how did X conference do against Y?” However there are an equally large sum that ask if it even matters.   Well, let me set the record straight, it matters.   The perception of your team is built in the post season, which is the last thing most reporters see before the season begins again.   How did a similar TCU squad barely end up starting the season ranked one year and then begin in top ten the next?  Easy, they were 4-8 the year before the first year and they destroyed an SEC team in a big bowl the second.  Oklahoma started the next season with more respect after beating Alabama in the Sugar Bowl the year before.

Reputations for teams and the conferences they belong to are made or broken in the post season.   The reason the SEC has an entire division ranked in the Top 25 in the preseason is because they not only won seven straight national championships with multiple teams, but they also won the majority of the rest of their post season match ups as well.   Reporters who vote are hedging their bets that one of them will be awesome.  If you look back over 20 some years at how the SEC did in the post season against the other conferences verses how they did during the regular season verses the other conferences, the differences are shocking.

The post season matters.

Now, with that being said, this article isn’t about who beat who, it is about analyzing the media numbers.  What these numbers show is what level of exposure a team gets within a conference for their games.   If they win them they’ll get a larger positive bonus from these numbers than losing.   However, losing with a big audience is better than winning with a little one.

Per the chart “Post Season: Conference Totals”, this is a synopsis of the total audience for each conference participating in the bowls this year.  In a sense, this is the exposure a conference receives for their games.   Per the intro, this is different than our regular season analysis because it is double counting the audiences.   Normally the audience is only counted for the home team, since that is the media contract that airs it.   However, for bowl games, home and visitor doesn’t mean much of anything with the bowl agreements.   If the SEC plays the Big 12 and ten million people watched it, then both teams receive the exposure for that game.

In this past year, the SEC had the largest total audience of any conference followed by the ACC, nearly 20 million viewers behind.  The Big Ten was nipping on the ACC’s heels while the Big 12 was 20 million behind them, 17 million under the Power Five average.   And last in the Power Five, came the Pac 12 who only had a total audience this year of 47 million.   A lot of that was due to being the conference left out of the playoffs this year, but some of can be attributed to the Pac 12 having a bad bowl schedule.

With that being said, these total numbers really don’t tell the entire story.   The SEC had eleven games to the Big 12’s seven.   If the SEC didn’t have a higher total then we’d be having a “what happened to the SEC?!” conversation right now.  For comparison purposes, look at the MAC’s performance verses the Big 12.  On the same seven games, the Big 12 generated 40 million more eyeballs than the MAC.  That’s the key to judging these conferences.  It isn’t the total audience that matters, it is the average audience per game that matters.  The Big 12 had 70% of its teams in bowl games, the SEC had 71.4%.  The more apt comparison then would be to look at how each conference did as an average to the games they played.
However, before running those numbers, there is one more defining characteristic we need to address first.   If you look at the performance by bowl you’ll notice one game really stands out; the national championship game.  Not only does it have an audience of 26 million people, but it is also a second game for two teams.   So the SEC had eleven games, but only ten teams participating, that skews the numbers considerably, especially when Alabama alone had an audience of 44 million over two games. With that in mind here is a graph showing the average audience per game for each conference, highlighting the affect the national championship game had on both the SEC and ACC in terms of audience per game.

When comparing apples to apples, so to speak, the SEC still comes out above the rest of the conferences, but by not nearly as much.   The ACC, Big 12, and Big Ten all average relatively the same before the drop off in the Pac 12 this year, which they should regain over the next few years.

The green area indicates the impact of the national championship game for both the ACC and SEC’s per game average, which was sizable.  Twenty six million people makes a mark.  However, if you take out the national championship game and just look at how each conference did within the remaining bowl line up, the Big 12 and the Big Ten outperformed the SEC and ACC.    That pretty much tells us that if you were the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, or SEC, you got about the same amount of exposure per game as your peers.

If you have any questions or would like some numbers discussed, contact The Number Monkey via “Ask the Monkey” in our forum, on Twitter @TheNumberMonkey or by email [email protected].

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