Please remind me exactly how much a MAC team gets for a midweek football game.
About $170,000. You could argue that the gate is more valuable if you could *prove* that it would sell out if it weren't on tv. Otherwise, it's all conjecture.
That number seems way low and even if you don't sell out, you make double that easy. Hell 15,000 at $25/each is $375,000 and that's not counting parking and concessions. Miami/Ohio would easily clip 15,000 on a Saturday, probably 20,000.
But you're looking at total gate revenue. The question is the DIFFERENCE in gate revenue between a Saturday afternoon and a Tuesday night. Especially when you consider several thousand of the lesser Tuesday crowd still were included in season tickets, and students are free anyway...the number is probably somewhere around 5k tops. Which would probably translate to around 100 grand, and you can start to see how that 170k broadcast bump makes sense.
There is also the argument of exposure, not just for the football program but the university at large. And in recruiting, being able to cite the number of games broadcast on ESPN or ESPN2 is impactful.
I do understand the argument, on both sides, which is why I actually like what our schedule has been for many years now, which is 4 weekend games and 2 weekday games. You get some of both. Playing all weekdays would be really dumb and awful. But never playing on ESPN wouldn't be good either.
The Extra Points newsletter had an interesting graphic today on how much alcohol is sold at college football stadiums so far this Fall. Through FOIA requests they got data from 21 institutions about their sales through August and September. This shows some of the revenue generated from home football games.
Not surprisingly, all the MAC Schools were pretty far down the list, due to mainly lower attendance/smaller stadiums. Listed in order by total revenue generated by alcohol sales.
Ohio is the highest Group of 5 team reported in the data. Miami - next to last
School Units Sold Total Revenue
University of Wisconsin, Madison 255,122 $3,088,690
University of Nebraska 168,293 $2,074,806.25
University of Tennessee 107,473 $1,623,728
LSU 134,668 $1,446,698
University of Minnesota No Data $1,038,758.67
University of Michigan 71,475 $985,266.05
Indiana University 85,887 $983,394
West Virginia University 98,147 $979,239
University of Kentucky No Data $898,584
Illinois 63,676 $743,690.59
Michigan State University No Data $234,016.73
Ohio University 22,248 $177,993.89
University of North Texas 13,848 $123,824
University of Toledo 17,720 $121,127.99
Bowling Green State University 7,375 $53,741.92
Central Michigan 4,872 $47,377
Western Michigan University No Data $30,370.39
UMass 2,378 $28,873
Miami University 3,184 $24,069
Ball State University 1,368 $11,504