Hello and welcome to FOIAball (Tuesday’s Version).
We are here a couple days early! That’s because we have some documents that cover exactly what everyone is talking about right now. So why wait?
Hope you don’t mind!
More like MAC-lysia
For the past week, college football fans have been bewildered by the dollar figure Sacramento State said its move to the MAC would be worth.
Last week, university president Dr. Luke Wood stated that joining the G5 conference would generate an estimated $975 million in economic impact.
That eyebrow-raising study was conducted by a third-party consulting firm on the university’s behalf.
And, a couple weeks ago, unrelated to this, we started filing FOIA requests on that firm.
Guess what we got back this week!
FOIAball obtained two final reports Collegiate Consulting delivered to schools about the economic impact of their athletics departments: one via a records request to Louisville, another that was helpfully posted online by Wyoming.
We got scooped a tad yesterday. Richard Johnson, of the tremendously great podcast SplitZone Duo and CBS Sports, spoke with the Collegiate Consulting CEO Russell Wright, who said that Wood unfairly extrapolated the numbers it presented to Sac State.
When Johnson presented the firm with different television viewership numbers for the MAC, Collegiate Consulting revised down its estimates.
Which is a wild thing to do when a school is paying somewhere in the neighborhood of $30,000 for you to produce a data-driven study. (Louisville, according to the contract we obtained, paid $50,000. Smaller schools paid less.)
Today, the firm reversed course, tweeting, “We stand by the study projecting a $194M Year One economic impact/valuation for their initial MAC FB season in Fall 2026, with the potential for five-year projections approaching $972M (194.4 X 5).”
So how did they get that near $1 billion figure?
Well… would you believe it was with the help of a random post on LinkedIn?
Sacramento State’s number isn’t anything special. Collegiate Consulting delivers those big figures to clients all the time.
Its report to Louisville opened by stating that, “Over the course of an athletic year, Louisville athletics provides a total average annual economic impact of $1.28 billion and over the three-year analysis a total impact of $3.84 billion.”
A major ACC team hyping that figure is perhaps more palatable than Sac State, but it’s not any more tangible. Let’s walk through it.
In 2023-2024, the firm found Louisville’s total economic impact was $1.7 billion.
That figure is comprised of three factors: Branding & Visibility; Game Day and Event Valuation; and Personnel, Student-Athletes, and SA Graduates Economic Impact.
We are going to ignore the latter two.
The Branding & Visibility figure is an attempt to discern how much a program being on TV is worth.
It’s calculated using something called Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE), a concept in public relations that the Institute of PR, back in 2003, said it “does not endorse as a measurement tool.”
The idea behind it is kinda logical, though. If a news broadcast or show mentions your business or product in a favorable light, that would have greater impact than an advertisement run during the commercial break.
In their white paper, the IPR said that AVE can be determined using a multiplier score of anywhere from 1.6 to six times the cost of an advertisement.
Collegiate Consulting says it uses a multiplier of three. In brief, it takes the total viewers of a game times the estimated advertising cost for the entirety of a game, then triples that to get a number.
Basically, it is saying the whole game is an ad, but also worth even more because it’s not advertising.
That extrapolation gives some truly jaw-dropping figures. Like a regular-season game against Florida State in 2022 being worth $300 million. Or Wyoming playing Texas Tech is the equivalent of $61,059,825.
In a statement to FOIAball, Wyoming said that it was happy with Collegiate Consulting’s work and said that university funds weren’t used for the study. Though maybe it shouldn’t be. Its annual economic impact was $206 million, which now puts it on the same footing as Sacramento State.
Okay, so why three?
Both the Cardinals and Wyoming’s final reports state that, “This section of the study examines the impact of media viewership … using a LinkedIn Insight Director’s framework for how to measure the value of media exposure.”
Later in the intro, it includes a quote that says, “editorial is a third-party opinion, so the value of publicity is deemed three times that of a paid advertisement.”
Naturally, we Googled that quote. Right away, we were served a brief 2018 LinkedIn article by the Malaysia and Emerging Markets Insight Director of a firm called Insentia.
Insentia specializes in the Asia-Pacific media market.
The post, titled “How To Measure The Value of Media Exposure," has pretty much identical language.
FOIAball could not find any other Insight Directors on LinkedIn who had used that language. And if you think that three times figures is some lost-in-translation, circular logic about what third-party really means, we can’t say! But maybe!
The full LinkedIn post is, ironically, actually discussing the drawbacks of AVE, saying it artifically inflates value.
The Institute of PR adds that, “When a client or boss asks … we hope that your first response will be to try to engage them in a discussion of the surrounding issues and as rapidly as possible change the discussion.”
If you want a real, technical analysis of the matter, FOIAball spoke to Greg Chick, the author of NILnomics, who is getting a Ph.D. in college sports economics.
He’s just a month away from being a full doctor, too, which, shoutout, Greg. We could never.
“Advertising Value Equivalency is at best a controversial approach for such an important economic analysis—it assigns arbitrary dollar values to media coverage with no connection to actual audience behavior or economic outcomes.”
“When AVE appears in an economic impact report used to justify public or institutional investment in college athletics, that’s a significant red flag. Decision-makers deserve analysis grounded in rigorous methodology, not a figure derived from multiplying a made-up rate card by an equally made-up multiplier.“”
Check out his fantastic economics of college sports blog here.
[Speaking of economic valuations, FOIAball’s is disconcertingly low. Raise it by becoming a paid subscriber today.]
The thing is, these studies are designed to be huge numbers that schools can tout.
The set-up is baked into the contracts, which FOIAball also obtained. In a section on the benefits of the report, Collegiate Consulting says one perk is the “creation of a narrative that is promoted on and off-campus of total value that a robust intercollegiate athletics program provides to the institution, town, and region.”
That narrative is useful for the most important thing a school can do. Raise money.
“Institutions that have completed their athletics valuation study are utilizing results as cornerstone for fundraising initiatives.”
Essentially, they are for employees and fans of the school to point at and be proud of. But they probably shouldn’t, like Sac State did, be cited as the basis for actual business decisions.
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And we’ll see you again on Thursday.
