The American Athletic Conference and its television partner ESPN have agreed to a new contract that will increase revenue for league members and funnel content to the network’s new online service, Sports Business Daily reported on Tuesday.
The deal will pay each school approximately $7 million per year — though I’m near certain AAC officials will burst into tears if we don’t cite the grand total of $1 billion paid over the 12 years of the contract. The figure represents a raise from the anemic $2 million UConn and its peers earned annually from the last deal negotiated by AAC Commissioner Mike Aresco. While many games will be featured on the bundle of ESPN cable networks, as well as select appearances on CBS and ABC, many more will be moved online-only to ESPN+, the new subscription-based streaming service.
This is bad, but maybe not in the ways you would think.
Sure, a large contingent of loyal fans will be annoyed. Remember the uproar when the UConn women’s games moved from their public access home on CPTV to SNY? That panic proved to be short-sighted and short-lived as both UConn and SNY thrived under the partnership. But UConn was also in a strong position to withstand the initial blowback.
Sports moving largely to a streaming service is certainly novel but is also likely the future. Eventually, with the slow but steady increase in cord-cutters and the accompanying improvements in network technology, ESPN could turn itself into Netflix — or, because this is America in 2019, get bought by Netflix. The problem for UConn is the timing.
Put bluntly, there are far fewer UConn fans now than there used to be. This is evident in television ratings, attendance figures and the university’s worsening financial standing. UConn has very little leverage to ask viewers to pay a tax in the form of an ESPN+ subscription.
If UConn can’t coax its fans into purchasing a subscription just for the privilege of watching the Huskies slug it out with Tulane on a Tuesday night, casual viewers will not be able to happen upon the broadcast. And while streaming sports will eventually become more common, at the moment almost no one is watching. ESPN+ has an estimated two million subscribers, and a portion of those hold the service as a bolt-on to their Insider website membership. For reference, as of 2015, ESPNU was available to over 70 million viewers via their cable package. At any given time, exceptionally few people are logging in to ESPN+, and traditional gathering places (read: sports bars) are far more likely to leave ESPN’s cable network running on the big screen than fire up the Roku and scroll through for that hot streaming AAC content.
Sure, UConn gets to cash ESPN’s checks regardless of who’s watching, but the lack of exposure will only worsen the university’s standing in the college sports world. The audience that no longer tunes to SNY or ESPNU to watch the team’s worst-in-the-nation football team will be even harder to lure back. The fans barely holding on to interest in a men’s basketball team that now perennially finishes below .500 may be reluctant to reward UConn’s on-court ineptitude with an extra $5 per month contribution to ESPN.
In some ways, this TV contract is good for UConn. But in every way, it’s better for the other members of the league. The bottom feeders like Tulsa and Tulane get a huge revenue boost that will finally elevate them out of their permanent Conference USA status and give them a chance to build programs capable of competing in the AAC. The power players like Houston, Cincinnati and the Florida schools avoided signing a Grant of Rights that would have locked them out of any future expansion by Power 5 conferences.
And while on its face it looks like UConn should be happy with the financial relief, the reality is that vestigial Big East exit fees and tournament credits — which are all but gone — paid UConn more in recent years than the new TV deal will. At best, this deal locked in the status-quo for UConn (and former Big East mates Cincinnati and USF). Instead of giving UConn a boost, it levels the playing field between UConn and its conference-mates, erasing some of the built-in advantages UConn had amassed from its tremendously successful past. And that likely means the gulf between UConn football and the conference elite will widen.
Theoretically the Huskies could also benefit from the freedom to leave the league, but at the moment, UConn is so far down the pecking order that it is much more likely — should expansion or realignment occur — that the Huskies would get left behind (again). Even if Dan Hurley completes the resurrection of UConn men’s basketball, it would take quite the leap of faith to expect the same from football — a program with an unstable coaching staff, no recruiting ability and soon even less television exposure. And then there’s the thing that we’re not supposed to talk about: the timing of Geno Auriemma’s eventual retirement. If he leaves before or during possible realignment discussions, UConn’s gold star women’s basketball program won’t look like such an appetizing bonus for other conferences and broadcast partners.
UConn appears to be approaching — or is in — a death spiral. The school needs to win back fans at the exact time it has become more challenging and expensive to get them to watch, and at a time when the on-court/field product is the worst its been in decades. The football program — already struggling — will lose regional and national exposure while its competitors with much more fertile recruiting territory receive an unprecedented (for them) influx of cash. UConn’s operating deficit ($40 million this year) will continue, possibly leading to hard decisions about spending on basketball programs. And, at any point during this ongoing crisis, the most prominent members of the league might depart.
This contract was always going to be revelatory, the moment we realized what a future in the conference looks like. It’s time to admit that UConn’s AAC experiment has failed — largely because of the school’s unacceptable athletic performance but also because it never really made sense to staple UConn onto a southern football conference without a built-in audience.
The options left for the university are limited but obvious. If you’ve been reading this website for long, you know that our staff is unanimous in believing the most prudent course is to disband the football program (there is no other financially viable home for it) and focus all remaining resources on retaining the legacy of basketball greatness that is rapidly disappearing in the AAC. This would mean a reunion with the Catholic schools of the Big East. This is the life raft option; the least bad choice.
An alternative is to slash athletic spending across the board and accept life as a mid-major athletic university. This is a deeply unsatisfying outcome but somewhat defensible given UConn’s financial situation. It would be an attempt to keep the department solvent while not completely sacrificing the institutional investment in football and basketball and the state’s investment in the (currently failing) stadium at Rentschler Field.
The most likely outcome, of course, is that UConn continues on its same path, pretending that the sky isn’t falling; that the stands aren’t emptying; that the casual fans aren’t losing interest in poor play in a conference they’ve never accepted as legitimate. In this scenario, UConn continues to milk its students to subsidize products that offer no return on investment and are continually moving further away from campus (if you think any XL Center renovation won’t include many more UConn games moving to Hartford, you’re a fool).
In recent years, UConn has put all its chips to the center of the table in hopes of hitting a Power 5 jackpot. An invite isn’t coming. The economic conditions that have relegated UConn to second-class status are exacerbated by this television contract and the longer it takes the university to recognize this, be honest with its fans, and act with necessary desperation, the harder it will be build a future for UConn athletics.
