AAC: We ‘deserve’ a lucrative new TV deal
The American Athletic Conference’s latest financial snapshot illustrates how important the next round of television and multimedia contract negotiations will be for the growing league.
The conference reported $74.47 million in total revenue for the 2016-17 fiscal year, the most recent documents available and obtained by the Orlando Sentinel.
Those figures are down slightly — 6 percent — from the previous year, during which the league reported $79.297 million in total revenue. It’s the first decrease in revenue for the AAC since the decline between 2013-14 to 2014-15, with the latter being the first year without Louisville and Rutgers as members of the league.
Compare the American’s 2016-17 revenue to figures recently released by the five automatic-qualifying conferences: SEC ($650 million), Big Ten ($531 million), Pac-12 ($509 million), ACC ($418 million) and Big 12 ($371 million).
According to the records, the American earned $42.179 million in postseason tournaments, including money generated from the NCAA Tournament, revenue from appearances in bowl games and a share of the College Football Playoff as mandated by the playoff management group.
The league received more than $20 million in revenue from its television and radio rights shared over a variety of networks, including ESPN and CBS Sports. The conference’s current media rights deal ends in 2020.
“The real game-changer for us would be TV because we’re just not getting anywhere near what we deserve in TV,” American Athletic Conference commissioner Mike Aresco said. “It’s a throwback to that five-year ago period when we were very unstable and the whole situation was unstable and that’s just not remotely true now.
“I think at the time, I don’t think anyone realized how powerful our schools could become. We’ve established ourselves as a nationally relevant and respected conference and now it’s a question of making sure that results in a TV deal that we need to keep this going. It’s a mixture of exposure and revenue.”
In 2016-17, South Florida received $8.877 million from the AAC, followed by UConn ($8.088 million), Cincinnati ($7.659 million), Houston ($5.410 million), Tulsa ($4.937 million) and Temple ($4.920 million). USF, UConn and Cincinnati are still receiving payments as part of the $70 million in exit fees for being former members of the Big East Conference, according to the Hartford Courant.
Memphis ($4.684 million), UCF ($4.042 million) East Carolina ($3.737 million), SMU ($3.701 million), Tulane ($3.587 million) and Navy ($2.623 million) account for the rest of the league’s revenue breakdown.
UCF saw an increase of 13 percent ($528,837) from the previous year.
Aresco made $1.79 million in salary in 2016-17, up slightly from the previous year of $1.724 million.
The AAC revenue figures are bound to look radically different for the 2017-18 fiscal year with the strong showing by UCF in the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl, one of the six access bowl games in the College Football Playoff, as well as the addition of Wichita State in basketball.