The Big 12's Potential Viewership Loss from OU & TX's Departure
I really can't stay . . .
Last weekend Oklahoma and Texas each played their last regular season game ever as a member of the Big 12 Conference. Both are set to join the SEC starting next summer.
As OU and Texas are by far the most popular current members of the Big 12, I thought I’d take a look at what the change might imply in terms of football popularity for the conference going forward. Specifically: How much will the Big 12 lose once OU and Texas leave in terms of football popularity as measured by viewership?1
Obviously this will be a crude analysis. I am going to examine just this past season’s TV viewership looking at averages with a simplistic approach to teasing out the OU/TX affect. Additionally, there are several factors not properly accounted for which I elaborate on below including their assumed impact.
My process is to compare the average viewers for each current Big 12 team for the 2023 season (conference and non-conference games when available) with and without games played against OU or Texas.
Summarizing the findings that are included in the picture below I find that OU and Texas averaged about 3.274mil viewers while the remaining Big 12 averaged about 1,493mil. The entire league’s average for all teams and all games was 1.54mil viewers but that declined to .961mil once games involving OU or Texas were excluded. This results in a 38% decline in viewers for the league overall implied by the exit of OU and Texas.
Alternatively, comparing all remaining Big 12 teams’ games with and without matchups directly against OU or Texas shows an average viewership of 1,203mil versus the same .961mil for a 20% decline. The interpretation of this number is the average impact to each individual team of OU and Texas exiting. The reason it is so much smaller than the prior comparison is it does not account for the synergistic loss to the league overall the way including OU and Texas’ viewership does.
Here is the summary table:
The analysis has the following shortcomings:
It is missing several games since I could not find data on them. These were games that were carried on ESPN+. While incomplete, the excluded games probably help the remaining Big 12 teams in these comparisons since those games are objectively less popular (i.e., have fewer viewers) than the games examined. Adding them to the analysis would diminish the calculated average viewership for the remaining Big 12 teams.
It excludes the added value of adding the four incoming teams for 2024—Utah, Arizona, Arizona State, and Colorado. These teams bring market share to the league (raw eyeballs) and the potential for one of them to be a national contender (more chances the league is relevant thus gaining it attention).
It does not account for the changing dynamics in the entire industry: namely, a much bigger competitive presence for the Big 10 and SEC potentially crowding out all the others. There is arguably no program in the new, post-2024 Big 12 that would rank in the top half of either of those 16-team leagues. Presumably this factor would reduce the viewership expectations of the new Big 12.
It does not directly compare each team’s average viewers in all games excluding OU or Texas versus that team’s specific number of viewers in just an OU or Texas matchup. One reason is that OU and Texas did not play each team in the league. Averaging across OU and Texas for each team (each team played one or the other or both) and comparing to each team’s average without OU and Texas would show a much greater expected loss since a matchup against OU or Texas was one of the biggest games for each remaining Big 12 team. Roughly it doubles the negative impact of OU and Texas leaving.
It includes two games not involving either OU or Texas that nevertheless certainly had artificially high viewership due to their impact on OU in particular. These would be the matchups between OSU and each of BYU and Houston. OU was in need of one of these opponents to defeat OSU in order for OU to make it to the Big 12 Championship Game.2 Including these two games might artificially boost the average for the remaining Big 12.
Notably some of the biggest non-conference matchups were against teams from one of the two “elite” future conferences, the SEC or Big 10. Only one stands out as an exception—TCU versus Colorado, a once and future Big 12 member. This speaks to the point above about how adding teams gives the chance to add a relevant team since at the start of the season TCU at least looked to be relevant having played for the national championship the prior year. Plus, Colorado had some extraordinary attention this year.
In a broader-picture takeaway, this is a little insight into club dynamics. When the dominant members of a club decide to exit their current arrangement of a being a big fish in a small pond to join a club of more equals, the loss to the exited club can be quite substantial.
Source: https://www.sportsmediawatch.com/college-football-tv-ratings/
There were indeed other scenarios, but these were by far the most impactful to this analysis.
Is the B12 cooked?