It's also worth remembering that the $17.14... contract was with 9 conference games. The $1+ million bump contract is with 8 conference games.
My gut tells me this will come out to close to $18.5 mil (That's a $1.35... mil increase, and CBS is reporting that the increase will be over a mil, so it can't be that far off). I was hoping to land in the $19-$19.5 mil range, but $18.5 plus an extra game isn't bad. The games in the Meadowlands are worth $2.5/game (they usually have a $5 mil game payout, but they usually require an away game, so it averages to $2.5 mil counting the away game). That means that if you count the Meadowlands games as conference games, because they would be WAY more difficult with a 9 game confernce schedule, then we make $21 million/yr less half of gate revenue for an average game. I'm guessing that it comes out pretty close to $20 million/yr plus post season payouts (NCAA credits, Bowls, conference tourneys, and so on). It's also worth noting that the ACC's fixed costs are spread over more schools than any other conference's fixed costs.
Assume that the Big XII and the ACC both have admin costs of $20 million. In such a scenario, each Big XII team would ahve to surrender $2 million/school to pay the overhead, whereas each ACC school would have to surrender $1.33... million to cover overhead. That leads to a $0.67 million savings for each ACC school when compared to each Big XII school.
It's also worth noting that the Big XII schools retained more tier 3 rights, but the value of those extra rights is only $1-2 million per school for most schools (i.e. schools not named Texas, Oklahoma, or Kansas). However, any eastern school playing in the Big XII would have substantially increased travel costs. There were complaints that SU and Pitt were going to add $2 million to each ACC school's travel costs (this was more than offset by the $4 million increase in the conference's TV payout as a result of adding SU and Pitt). However, based on that, you have to think that WVU is paying $1-2 million more in travel than SU, which offsets any difference in tier 3 revenue.
Given that the BIG EAST didn't split revenue equally, I think that the difference in payout between SU and WVU will actually shrink as a result of them going to the Big XII and us going to the ACC, and that doesn't count attendance. Yes, Texas and OU v. WVU will sell out, but Clemson and FSU v. SU will have a great attendance, and ND v. SU (every 3 years) will sell out, and Pitt and BC v SU will do well. In the end, both SU and WVU will get one elite at home game a year, but where WVU plays Baylor, KSU, Kansas, TCU, and a bunch of jack nobodies from a 1,000 miles away, we at least have Pitt and BC who are close to home, a home game against ND every 6 years, and a bunch of upper middle tier teams (down Miami, down Virginia Tech, a down Georgia Tech, and an up UL). Throw in better ACC basketball and ticket sales swing even more in SU's favor.
I honestly think that the ACC > Big XII for Syracuse and Pitt, and the ACC >> Big XII for every other school in the conference (except possibly UL), because most other schools are either farther away from the Big XII (BC) or within spitting distance of half the conference (Clemson, WF, Duke, UNC, NCSU, UVA, and VTech). Even FSU and Miami have each other, and GT has 60 years of history with the old ACC.
