There was a discussion that started yesterday in the B1G investigation post about whether or not PSU would be better off in a different conference, specifically the ACC. I dug up some numbers from this source to highlight the revenue discrepancies between the B1G and the ACC.

Based on the numbers in that article, on a per school basis and based on 12 teams in each conference (not counting Pitt and the Cuse yet), each ACC school receives about $13 million per year, and each B1G school receives $20-$24 million. The numbers at the table at the bottom of the article are a bit inconsistent with the text as the B1Gs numbers don't get that high in the table, but I've seen reported elsewhere that the B1G's numbers are north of $20 million. Regular readers of Frank the Tank's blog will note that he has calculated B1G revenues to be so far and away larger than anyone else's that they actually put Notre Dame third in it's own state in terms of TV revenue. I think a reasonable assumption is that a move to the ACC would be about a $10 million hit annually.

The Nittany Lion Club in its annual report cites an annual athletic budget of $107 million, of which $94 million goes to pay sport related expenses and the rest is used to fund new athletic facilities. This means a switch to the ACC would knock about a 10% hole in the budget, which is hardly insignificant. Football expenses are around $16 million, basketball expenses are a bit under $5 million combined men's and women's, and the rest of the sports are around $11 million. The rest of the money goes to things like facilities operations, scholarships, administration, academic support etc.

Now, it would be nice if that deficit could be made up with a little "belt tightening" but I don't think it's unreasonable to assume the PSU already operates as efficiently as it can. To make up a deficit like that requires either increased revenue or decreased costs. The simple options are:

1) Start using tuition and taxpayer dollars from the general fund on athletics. I really don't think that a school which is trying to re-emphasize its academic brand wants to go there.

2) Cut sports, or cut support for those sports such as scholarships, coaching salaries, or new facility construction.

3) Increase revenue. Now it would be nice to think that the ACC's contracts would go up and that the proposed ACC network would bring increased revenue, but this is a major business decision based on a whole lot of hope compared to the bird-in-hand B1G revenue base. The only concrete way to raise revenue would be to either increase donation levels or increase football ticket prices. Football revenues are around $49 million a year from ticket sales, and the NLC revenues are about $14 million. Making up the deficit through tickets requires a 20% increase in ticket revenue, or a 70% increase in NLC donation revenue, or some combination of the two.

So that's the framework under which Penn State athletics operates. My armchair athletic director opinion is that all three options are quite unpalatable just to feel more chummy in another conference, but hopefully this outline will help clarify some things for the sake of conversation.

I just got off the phone with some chicky-pop calling from PSU. It was the usual routine, she verified my address etc. and started talking about all the improvements on campus and thanked me for my past support. It's always a girl calling, I think they have in my file somewhere: "Sucker for a hot sounding woman."

So, I humored her and waited for the punchline, and she finally asked for some very large some of money to support academic programming and the individual colleges from which my wife and I graduated. I'm pretty sure they have a formula for the amount to ask, based on past donations raised to some exponent.

I had to tell her "Listen, I'm about to write a big check for STEP and the NLC in a couple of weeks before the end of the year, and that's all I can swing at the moment".

She understood, thanked me for my support of athletics, and said they were trying to do development for academics as well. Which left me thinking after the phone call, "Gee it's kind of jackassery for me to write a large check for my football entertainment, and not have much left over to support the actual important stuff at the university."

So the question is, since people have to dig deeper for STEP, will that hurt fundraising for the rest of the university's missions? Are they going to end up shafting the things that are kinda more important to society, like education and research?

While watching RichRod kick the extra point to send the UM/MSU game into overtime on Sat, I wondered: Why didn't he just go for two points and the win right then and there?

After a team scores a touchdown at the end of the game where the 6 puts you one shy of tying the game, as a coach you have two choices: kick the extra point and send the game to OT, or go for the two-point conversion and the win right then and there. I think most coaches play it conservative and kick in order to avoid the second guessing, but is this really the best strategy? If you go for the two, you have the ball on the 3 yard line with one shot to make those 3 yards, and no chance of the other team's offense getting on the field. If you go into OT, you have a coin toss, and one way or another you both get the ball at the 25, meaning you have to move the ball a bunch on plays that have to average more than 3 yards each anyway,  and you also have to play defense at some point.

Now I know the counter-argument is that by going for two, you only get one shot, and if something goes wrong, you don't get another play to make up for it. But so many things could go wrong on the extra point, on offense, on defense, that I think the odds are strongly in your favor to simply man up and take that single shot from the 3 yard line. I don't know the stat on percentage of two-pointers successfully converted, but unless your game played out in a defensive struggle where the only 2 TDs were scored by the respective defenses, I can't see how going to OT gives you a better chance of winning.