MEDIA MATTERS:

TIER TWO ANALYSIS

In Part One of this series I looked at how Tier One inventory was created and how it performed over the past several years. I will reference aspects that were explained in that article within this analysis, if you have not yet, please feel free to start with the first:

Within that article it was mentioned that Notre Dame shook up the college football broadcasting system in 1990 when they broke from the CFA and negotiated their own Tier One deal with NBC, prior it was all negotiated by the CFA and prior to that the NCAA themselves. The SEC would soon follow with a deal to increase their exposure with CBS, who would televise twelve games a year. Like Notre Dame a version of this deal remains today, with CBS showing around SEC games a year, guaranteeing at least one game for each school and a championship game.

While this departure from the CFA sent some shockwaves, the SEC wasn’t done. ESPN had struck a second deal with the SEC to choose a broadcast per week that CBS didn’t pick, giving the SEC games on two networks, instead of one.. This had not been done before and, with that move, the SEC and ESPN basically created what we now call Tier Two inventory.

This Tier Two inventory was originally defined two ways; either appearing on national cable broadcasts, as opposed to “over the air”, or whatever inventory the primary network partner did not want. For the SEC, CBS was (and still is) the primary network partner and has first choice of games in a given week. ESPN then decides which games it wants from the remaining inventory with the second choice. It is not as valuable as the games chosen first, but there is more of it. This past year the SEC had between 50-60 games for ESPN to choose.

Over the past four years, as Tier Three inventory has exploded in use, Tier Two was easily defined as “cable”. Now a days, however, with there being many more cable channels than the 90s, I think only a few, specific, sports channels classify as Tier Two channels; ESPN, ESPN2, and FS1. They have an audience twice that of the rest of the networks, providing a clear demarcation point when we describe the value of games shown. A good lesson for us that not every one of the 13 networks airing college football games is created equal.

ESPN is the clear leader within the second tier and is nearly a Tier 1.5. It has couple massive audience games, like Ohio State vs Virginia Tech, which drew 10.5 million people on a Monday night in week one, that rival Tier One inventory. However, it also aired 73 other games, which dropped the network’s average to about half of the Tier One networks.

In the past two years ESPN’s total audience has increased by 3.75% from 192 million people to 200 million people. This is a departure from the Tier One Analysis, where we saw viewership decrease by 23% since 2013. ESPN’s sister station, ESPN2, has mimicked the Tier One inventory, however, showing a 25% decrease in audience since 2013, which is quite a bit for an established network. Since 2013 it has lost 16 million viewers. Some of this is likely a shift to viewers moving to an ESPN game on at the same time, which keeps the audience within the ESPN Family, but a significant chunk of that is probably also from competition.

Fox Sports 1, which launched just a few years ago, has grown its market at a consistent clip year over year. Since 2013, FS1 has showed a 19% increase in total viewership, even after showing a decrease in average audience per game of 7.7% from 2014 to 2015.

When plotting the performance of both ESPN2 and FS1 it really stands out with how drastic the situation may become. ESPN2 was able to keep its total audience elevated in 2014 due to airing 10 more games, even with audience reduction of 20,000 per game. However, losing 295,000 per game from 2013 to 2015 and going back to the same amount of games shown in 2013 led to a gigantic drop compared to the competition. If this keeps up, which is possible, but not likely, FS1 will eclipse ESPN2 within the next five years.

Even with this decrease in viewership in ESPN2 it is still, along with FS1, watched over twice as much as the next batch of channels, which is why the line in the sand between Tier Two and Tier Three is drawn here. The remaining sports networks have such low viewership that placing them within this group will skew the data too drastically.

When analyzing the Tier One data it stood out that there is a large gap in value between conference games and out of conference, or nonconference, games. Within the Tier Two inventory this becomes even more pronounced.

A good measure for whether a game will be watched or not is the combined winning percentage of the two teams playing in the game. When looking at straight averages, out of conference games had an average winning percentage of 60% while the conference games averaged 62%. Not that drastic of a difference.

However, when we map out all of the games a fuller picture develops. While there are one or two games that pull the average up for the out of conference averages, there are far more conference games that have far more compelling matchups for audiences to watch. Per the chart you can see that there is an entire section to the right of the out of conference line where quality games appear within the conference schedule. In fact, the only reason why the conference games trended down on average is, as the season progresses, some conference games feature teams who have taken many losses in conference play, which is to be expected. There are always the same amount of wins and losses in a conference schedule. And, considering that, you’d expect the peak of the conference bell curve to hover somewhere from 50-60%, depending on how well the conference had performed in out of conference match ups. But, within Tier Two games, we’re seeing this curve trend towards the higher valued match ups, indicating that not only are conference games more attractive, which draws greater audiences, but the Tier Two networks are picking favorable games from a still larger pool of games, even if they are choosing second.

What this chart doesn’t tell us, however, is just how much more valuable games become as the matchups improve. Within the Tier One analysis we saw a spike in viewership once a game featured teams with a combined winning percentage, at the time, of 65%. While there is a pretty linear correlation between winning percentage and audience within the Tier Two games, the audiences seem to pick up greatly once that 65+% winning percentage is achieved. Just like we saw within the Tier One games.

When looking at nearly 260 of the best college football games of the past year, all of them show a clear benefit to larger audience size once you eclipse the magical 65% combined winning percentage of the participants. That is too specific over too many games to be a coincidence. Winning is what draws audiences to games. Everything else, from brand to location to conference, just modifies that number slightly. None of those other categories show any defined trend of benefiting audience size on their own.

As more inventory has been added to these deals, networks have had to get creative when finding places to show all of the games. There are roughly four inventory slots on any given Saturday per channel, which for Tier Two allows 12 games per week to be shown. However there are nearly 30 games broadcast in any given week. In order to take on more inventory, channels have had to move games on other days of the week.

These off weekend games tend to be featured in primetime by the networks, so fewer games are shown. And, in doing so, the networks maximize their audience in what would normally be a low viewership night. As you can see from the chart, Saturday still dominates not only the quantity of games shown, but also the quality. The highest amount of games with the highest audiences are still featured on Saturday, which is also when it is most convenient for schools to host football games. However, Thursday and Friday nights are starting to provide consistent audiences within the Tier Two networks, even with there being far more games broadcast on Thursday than Friday. Several games are now also broadcast on Tuesday and Wednesday, but these are rarer and have smaller potential audiences. Boise State took advantage of these times in the 2000s to gain airtime for their program and now these two days are dominated by the Group of Six.

Outside winning percentage and day, the next biggest factor in gauging the potential audience for a game is the time of day it airs. Think of it this way, the time and place of the inventory, like Mid Afternoon on Saturday, acts as the potential audience a game may have. The match up, e.g. the winning percentage of the teams featured, dictates how much of that potential audience tunes in.

Within the Tier One inventory it was shown that games were pretty strong within the noon and afternoon slots leading up to a peak a Prime Time. However, after primetime, or games starting after 9pm Eastern, audiences dropped off considerably. Late night, or West Coast, games show a 35% drop in audience from Prime Time games, which start just two hours prior. Matter a fact, when you only factor in the best of the best games, e.g. those with a winning percentage better than 65%, Late Evening games fall 30% below Prime Time audiences and 36% below afternoon audiences.

The populous East Coast simply doesn’t watch late night games.

