Sports Data From Nielsen: TV Viewership for College Conferences and Pro Sports Social Media Buzz

This blog has been a hub of activity for conference realignment discussion and other issues in the business of sports for the past couple of years, but it has sometimes been difficult to get quantitative data to back up what many of us observe qualitatively (such as the popularity of fan bases and conferences).  So, the following presentation direct from Nielsen (the TV ratings firm) about the 2011 sports year provides a treasure trove of previously unknown (at least to me) and fascinating statistics about pro and college sports TV viewership, social networking buzz and ad spending:

State of the Media 2011 Year in Sports

This slide presentation was uploaded by ceobroadband at slideshare.net.  Nielsen analyzed everything from the four major pro sports leagues to the rising viewership of the English Premier League in the US, so there’s something here for every type of sports fan.  It’s key that this analysis is coming directly from Nielsen itself, whereas a lot of other viewership figures that get reported these days come from leagues, conferences and TV networks themselves and are spun to put them in the most favorable light.  As a result, the slide presentation is about as unbiased as you can reasonably get on the subject matters at hand.

One of the more interesting charts is on slide 4, where Nielsen tracked the social media buzz for the major pro sports leagues over the course of 2011 and news events where activity spiked on Twitter and Facebook.  Major League Baseball can’t be happy to see social networking mentions hover around the NHL’s numbers and its 7-game World Series last year didn’t produce a real spike in activity compared to the NBA Finals.  I’m not surprised by the fact that the NBA has more social networking buzz compared to MLB since the basketball league’s fan base skews younger, but I didn’t expect baseball to be on the social media level of hockey.  (Note that there’s no point in comparing any other sport to the NFL in America: pro football blows everything else away on every metric.  The only discussion is about who can take second place.)

For college sports fans, slide 9 presents some extremely pertinent information that few of us have seen before: the average TV viewer numbers per game for each of the 6 power conferences for both football and basketball.  With so many issues in college sports, such as conference realignment and a football playoff, driven by television money, these viewership figures are enlightening (and surprising in some cases).

Here are the average football viewership totals by conference according to Nielsen:1. SEC – 4,447,000
2. Big Ten – 3,267,000
3. ACC – 2,650,000
4. Big 12 – 2,347,000
5. Pac-12 – 2,108,000
6. Big East – 1,884,000

Here are the average basketball viewership totals by conference according to Nielsen:1. Big Ten – 1,496,000
2. ACC – 1,247,000
3. SEC – 1,222,000
4. Big 12 – 1,069,000
5. Big East – 1,049,000
6. Pac-12 – 783,000

Some takeaways from those figures:

A. The Big Ten and SEC deserve every penny that they receive and then some – The readers of this blog probably aren’t surprised by the football viewership numbers, but the proverbial icing on the cake is how strong both of them are in basketball.  ACC alum Scott Van Pelt of ESPN once said, “Watching Big Ten basketball is like watching fat people have sex.”  Well, the Big Ten even tops the vaunted the ACC in basketball viewership and it’s by a fairly healthy margin.

B. The ACC has an undervalued TV contract – The flip side of the Big Ten and SEC analysis above is that while the ACC’s basketball viewership strength isn’t unexpected, the much maligned football side actually has strong TV numbers.  If you take a step back for a moment, it makes sense.  Florida State and Miami continue to be great national TV draws (even when they’re down) and schools such as Virginia Tech bring in large state markets.

C.  Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott can sell ice cubs to Eskimos – The viewership numbers for the Pac-12 in both football and basketball indicate that they shouldn’t be in the vicinity of the ACC and Big 12 TV contracts, much less currently above the Big Ten and SEC.  The football numbers might be a little lower compared to a normal season with USC having the scarlet letter of not being able to go to a bowl this year, but one would think that some of that would have been countered by strong Stanford and Oregon teams.  Meanwhile, the basketball numbers are just awful – the Pac-12 definitely needs UCLA to resuscitate itself to be viable nationally.  The Pac-12 presidents ought to give Larry Scott a lifetime contract with the TV dollars that he’s pulled from ESPN and Fox.

D.  Big East basketball is a weaker draw than expected – No one should be surprised by the weak Big East football numbers.  However, the basketball and large market-centric side of the league actually had fewer hoops viewers than any of the power conferences except for the Pac-12, which doesn’t bode well with the league losing the strong draws of Syracuse, Pitt and West Virginia.  The Big East was also widely acknowledged as the top conference in basketball last year, so the league was at its competitive peak in the post-2003 ACC raid era.  This gives credence to the argument that large media markets in and of themselves don’t matter as much as large and rabid fan bases that draw in statewide audiences.

E.  The Big 12 is appropriately valued – For all of the dysfunction of the Big 12, it might be the one conference whose TV contracts are actually in line with their viewership numbers.  The Big 12 is ranked #4 among the power conferences for both football and basketball and the likelihood is that it will end up as the #4 conference in TV dollars after the Big Ten, Pac-12 and SEC when all is said and done.

There’s lots of other data to chew on here that I may examine in future posts, but for now, the college conference viewership breakdown is something that I haven’t seen before and puts some quantitative backup to what we have speculated was behind conference realignment moves.

(Follow Frank the Tank’s Slant on Twitter @frankthetank111 and Facebook)

(Slides from slideshare.net)

Frank the Tank’s Slant on Twitter

I apologize for the lack of blog posts over the past month as my family and work obligations have been impeding on my ability to write pithy comments about the Bulls’ obsessive need to draft more tweener forwards.  (That being said, I haven’t really missed writing about the White Sox and the general awfulness of Chicago baseball this summer.)  The full-length posts will soon return, but in the meantime, feel free to follow Frank the Tank’s Slant on Twitter as I’m more able to squeeze in some 140 character thoughts these days with my new iPhone.  This is a public page (so you can read my musings regardless of whether you have a Twitter account or not) where the types of content will essentially mirror what’s seen on the blog (meaning that I won’t be boring you with inane details about the contents of my cat’s lunch even though I might find such Tweets personally amusing) – microblogging, as the digerati like to say.  So, check out the Tweets and have a great Fourth of July weekend!

Low Scoring Isn’t the Problem: The Real Roadblock for Soccer in America

Mr. Posh Spice AKA David Beckham has arrived in America and there’s been the predictable discussions as to whether his presence in Major League Soccer will finally bring the United States into concurrence with the rest of the world of viewing the original football as a preeminent spectator sport.  A lot of the naysayers argue that Americans will never warm to soccer because we need lots of scoring (being the land of excess that we are), which soccer doesn’t provide.  Of course, I’ve always found this ludicrous, since a 1-0 pitchers’ duel in baseball is infinitely more exciting than a 12-11 slugfest, while football of the American variety assigns multiple points to each of its scores which artificially raises the numerical total score (we might look at it differently if a 21-14 game was instead called a 3 touchdowns to 2 touchdowns game).  Sure, there are those that like scoring for the sake of scoring, just as there are those that believe Larry the Cable Guy is a comedic genius.  That doesn’t mean that this is necessarily the view of the majority.

However, I will be a naysayer on soccer’s popularity as a spectator sport in the U.S. on a different front which ought to be obvious but I rarely hear being brought up in discussions about the game (in contrast to the simplistic “low scoring” issue).  If you’ve ever read “The World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman, he uses an apt sports analogy as to how the United States has attained its success over the past century.  He states that historically, we have been the best on grabbing the “first round draft picks” from around the world in nearly every walk of life, whether it’s scientists that come to study and research at our top universities, computer and technology pioneers building companies in Silicon Valley, financiers running the world’s capital markets on Wall Street and LaSalle Street, actors and actresses making films in Hollywood, and competitive eaters attacking hot dog stands on Coney Island.  Our success has largely been predicated on attracting the best of the best from the rest of the world (look at the disproportionate number of immigrants in America that have founded technology companies, run corporations, or are A-List celebrities) and the world of sports in general is certainly no exception.  The world’s top basketball players, even if they are superstars in their home countries, invariably long to come to the NBA.  The same thing applies with baseball.  When we watch professional sports in this country, part of the allure is that we know that we are watching the very top players in the world competing at the highest level.  That’s why we feel justified (or maybe we’re so vain) to crown our ultimate winners in the postseasons of our pro sports leagues as “World Champions” – other countries be damned.

Of course, there’s one glaring exception to this superiority, if you haven’t already figured it out: soccer.  If we called the champions of the MLS “World Champions”, that would be the biggest joke to the rest of the world since the fact that we voted George W. Bush into office not once, but twice.  (I’ll admit that I was a contributor to this.  Sorry, folks.)  Do you know how NBA fans like myself have a nice chuckle over the grainy footage posted on YouTube of Yi Jianlian posting up 5′ 5″ power forwards in the Chinese Basketball Association since the quality of play between the leagues is so glaringly wide?  Well, that’s exactly how fans of the English Premier League and other top European leagues feel when they watch the MLS.  The reason why watching the MLS feels like watching minor league baseball to me is because that’s exactly what it’s comparable to: it can be perfectly nice family entertainment for an evening, but it’s very apparent that the best in the world aren’t on the field.

Americans have already shown that they have the capacity to watch top quality soccer with their increasing interest in the World Cup and the U.S. national team over the past decade.  The ratings for the World Cup last year vastly exceeded expectations even when the U.S. team got bounced out early.  However, that doesn’t translate into increased attention for the MLS at home since the average sports fan intuitively knows the difference in the quality of play between the World Cup and MLS, even if the games have the same 1-0 score (just as you can tell the difference in the quality of play between a Major League Baseball game and a minor league baseball game even if the scores are the same).  We will gladly spend our precious time and hard-earned dollars on watching the best of the best, whether it’s sports or movies, but we will only give a passing glance to anything less than that.

What American soccers needs is David Beckham… from five years ago when he was in his prime, along with attracting other soccer superstars from around the world while they are at the tops of their games as opposed to being on the descent.  Until the MLS (or some other professional soccer league) gets to the point where it can legitimately call its champion at the end of the year the “World Champions” or at the very least be able to compete with the top European leagues without being laughed off the field, soccer as a spectator sport is going to have a hard time gaining traction outside of the World Cup and the U.S. national team.  The scoring issue has nothing to do with the soccer’s problems.  It’s all about the quality of play.

(Image from The Big Lead) 

Land-o-Links – 7/21/2006

I’m not happy with the performance of the White Sox lately at all. If this keeps up, we might be worrying a lot more about the AL wild card contenders behind us right now than Detroit. Well, at least there are some links to take away attention from the slumping Sox:

1) Making Money in Basketball (Blog Maverick) – Mark Cuban’s suggestion on how to build a successful minor league basketball franchise: pay off high school kids… seriously. While his “business plan” here starts with this unfathomable leap, he does make an excellent point as to how European basketball teams make their serious profits from the buyout clauses of the players that they develop that go on to the NBA and that there’s no reason that an American minor league club couldn’t do the same. The Wall Street Journal had an article a couple of weeks ago about how the reverse of this money flow occurs in the soccer world, where European soccer clubs will pay large “transfer rights” to Latin American clubs for the top players that they develop, which are completely separate from the actual playing contracts for those players (it’s a virtual stock market regarding the value of soccer players, which is why the Journal reported that hedge funds have been getting into the action). In the case of superstar Cristiano Ronaldo, Manchester United paid his old club in Portugal $19.2 million for his transfer rights. Something tells me that the Pistons paid a bit less for the rights to Darko Milicic (although I could be very wrong in that thought).

2) Scientists Plan to Rebuild Neanderthal Genome (New York Times) – They’re exclusively using DNA samples from Patrick Ewing and Bill Laimbeer.

3) Ex-Village People Singer Answers Charges (Los Angeles Times) – You knew it had to be the cop, right? By the way, it might be just me, but I always have an internal chuckle at every wedding that I attend where all of the grandmothers are whooping it up to “YMCA” since it’s obvious that they have absolutely no clue what that song is about.

4) Remini Held Suri Cruise During L.A. Visit (Washington Post) – There still hasn’t been any denial that this baby is an alien cyborg. Hmmmm….

5) Quite Frankly, Baker Bails Out (Chicago Tribune) – A number of Cubs bloggers received emails that appeared to come from the producers of Stephen A. Smith’s show on ESPN, urging them to join the studio audience during a Dusty Baker interview and boo him. Smith stated that he believed it was a hoax and then blamed Deadspin for all of this. Of course, Deadspin has a nice retort to Stephen A’s accusations.

And finally…

6) Pennsylvania Man, 80, Admits Dealing Crack for Sex (San Francisco Chronicle) – On that note, have a great weekend!

The Battle of the Sox That Wouldn’t End

On a day where Italy bested France on penalty kicks to win the World Cup and the Chicago area hosted a PGA Tour event (following up on my diatribe on this subject a few months ago, Rick Morrissey beautifully tore a new one into the PGA president for dropping the Western Open and rotating the tournament out of Chicago every other year starting in 2007) and a NASCAR race (pretty boy Jeff Gordon took the checkered flag in the USG Sheetrock 400) within a few miles of each other, the White Sox and Red Sox engaged in a 19-inning game that brought to the forefront a lot of issues for the second-half of the baseball season. A few thoughts heading into the All-Star break (no White Sox or Cubs games until Friday???):

1) The Pair of Sox Are Baseball’s Best – At the beginning of the year, I had about as much faith in Curt Schilling and Josh Beckett holding up for the entire season as I did in Mark Prior and Kerry Wood (who might be done forever) doing the same, which is the reason why I had picked Boston to finish behind both the Yankees and Blue Jays in the AL East. Well, it turns out that Schilling and Beckett haven’t broken down while the Bosox have solved their closer problems (Minneapolis Red Sox had a nice post last week on what makes a quality closer) with the emergence of Jonathan Papelbon (save for Jermaine Dye’s line drive rocket out of the park with 2 outs in the 9th to bring the White Sox back to life yesterday). With their pitching staff largely in order and possibly the strongest batting lineup from top to bottom in baseball, the Red Sox look like they are in better shape this season than they were when they won it all in 2004.

Meanwhile, the White Sox are bashing the ball on offense a lot better than last season, but the pitching staff has taken a step back. Bobby Jenks, of all people, has become the most stabilizing and consistent force off the mound for the ball club. The White Sox starting rotation hasn’t been clicking on all cylinders for quite awhile despite the fact that Jose Contreras hasn’t lost a decision since last August. Contreras has continued to be a rock, but the consistency from game-to-game for the rest of the starters has been lacking so far. Fortunately, the superior depth that the White Sox have in this spot means that they have a great chance to rectify this in the second half. I’m more considered about the middle relievers, who, outside of Neal Cotts, continue to fail to inspire confidence in me. That’s the area that I’m looking for Kenny Williams to shore up prior to the trade deadline. Still, we’re in a great spot here. I don’t think the White Sox have been playing up to par pitching-wise at all, yet they still have the second-best record in baseball.

Regardless, this weekend’s White Sox-Red Sox tilt was a possible ALCS preview with a look at the top two teams in the game at this time (the Tigers are just mercilous with their continued winning, but until they beat the White Sox head-to-head in a series, they’ve got a gaping hole on their resume). For that matter, if we took a combination of the top starting position players from just the White Sox and Red Sox and put them up against the starters from the National League All-Star Game, the only spot where I believe the NL would have an advantage would be at first base with Albert Pujols (and even there, a combined Sox team wouldn’t be giving up much at all with Paul Konerko or one of the virtual first basemen of David Ortiz or Jim Thome). The Red Sox took the weekend overall, but the White Sox winning a marathon game with two separate comebacks has got to have some carry-over effect the next time these two clubs meet in September at Fenway Park.

2) The White Sox Aren’t a Small Ball Team and Never Have Been – During the White Sox playoff run last season, there was a myth propogated by the national media that the team engaged in “small ball” or a bastardized version call “Ozzie Ball” that was the antithesis of the Moneyball philosophy advanced by Oakland’s Billy Beane and his follower Theo Epstein in Boston. This seemed to become the conventional wisdom despite the fact that the White Sox were fourth in the American League in home runs last season with higher power totals than the perceived-to-be-stronger-on-offense Red Sox.  I guess the media forgot that teams other than the Red Sox and Yankees actually existed in the American League, so they went and continue to go overboard in attempting to differentiate the White Sox.

All of this wouldn’t bother me if the White Sox themselves didn’t buy into this myth and just realize that they win a lot more of their games by Moneyball-esque power than by small ball. Instead, we get situations such as the bottom of the 17th inning yesterday. At that time, the White Sox had runners at first and second with nobody out and all they needed was one run to score to win the ballgame. It’s perfectly smart baseball to lay down a sacrifice bunt to move a runner who wouldn’t reasonably be able to steal from first base to scoring position. However, I’m not a fan of attempting a sac bunt when there is: (a) a man already in scoring position, (b) an advantageous 2-0 count in favor of the hitter, or (c) two strikes on the hitter. All of this occurred in the same at-bat by Tadahito Iguchi in that 17th inning, who ended up popping out straight to the pitcher on an attempted bunt with two strikes on him. Of course, the White Sox then grounded into a double play after that to kill the potential for a win in that inning. Fortunately, Iguchi redeemed himself by hitting the game-winning single in the 19th.

The point here is that the White Sox are not a small ball team and, therefore, shouldn’t try to act like a small ball team. If a guy is already in scoring position, the team has good enough hitters where a bunt has more of a chance to hurt them than to help. This is the only thing that Ozzie Guillen does as a field general that I have any criticism over.

3) Player to Dye For – Jermaine Dye was the MVP for the White Sox yesterday with both his bat with a 2-out 9th inning homer to tie the game and glove with an outstanding catch to prevent possibly a triple by the White Sox. For that matter, he has been the MVP for the White Sox for this entire first half of the season. If a World Series MVP could ever be underrated, Dye would fit the bill. While Jim Thome has certainly electrified the crowds at U.S. Cellular Field with his moonshot home runs, Paul Konerko gets the “Paulie” chants, and A.J. Pierzynski attracts attention in every way, Dye has quietly gone about his business by killing the ball at the plate and snatching everything in right field. An even better reward than the invitation to tonight’s Home Run Derby for the White Sox leader would be the opportunity to start in the All-Star Game itself as a replacement for the “injured” Manny Ramirez (he didn’t look hurt in playing all 19 innings yesterday). This is bigger no-brainer for Ozzie Guillen than any of his discretionary picks of White Sox players for the All-Star roster. Jermaine Dye should be starting in right field on Tuesday night.

Land-o-Links – 6/13/2006

A post on a sport that I never write about is on tap for tomorrow. Hint: it's not about soccer, which Minneapolis Red Sox has already eloquently addressed. By the way, I'm in search of new country to root for in the World Cup as the U.S. and Poland were inept in their opening games and won't make it to the final 16 unless they can pull off upsets against some superpowers. Also, I believe Las Vegas oddsmakers have put the over/under for the number of days after the World Cup ends that it takes for that guy from Paraguay who headed the ball into his own net this past weekend to "disappear" at negative 3. Anyway, here are today's links:

1) Multiple Injuries, Few Injuries for Roethlisberger (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) – WTF, Big Ben?! As my buddy B-Diddy mentioned, Ben Roethlisberger wore a helmet everyday to work, so why would he not wear one riding a motorcycle going 60-plus miles per hour? I was in a catatonic state for days after Jay Williams wrapped his motorcycle around a pole on the North Side of Chicago (throwing the Bulls back into a hole that they were just starting to come out of at that time), so I can only imagine how Steeler Nation is feeling right now after seeing this happen to their star quarterback that's coming off winning a Super Bowl in only his second season in the NFL.

It isn't too strange that Pennsylvania doesn't have a helmet law for motorcycle riders. What is wacky to me, though, is that it used to have a helmet law until 2003, when it was then repealed. So, enough Pennsylvania politicians were actually convinced that the law was such a bad idea that they had to get rid of it. The biker lobby must have joined forces with Charlton Heston and the NRA to get that type of result.

Let's just hope Big Ben comes out of this okay.

2) For Some, Online Persona Undermines a Resume (New York Times) – Word to the wise: remove any references as to how you "smoke blunts" off of your MySpace personal profiles. As one fellow Illinois grad found out (thanks for making us look like schmucks, dude), that's probably a bad idea when you're looking for a job.

3) Worst-Case CTA Scenarios (Chicago Tribune) – No mention of what to do if you're trapped on the El with Ronnie Woo Woo, which has happened to me on multiple occasions.

And finally… 

4) How To Brainwash Your Baby Early (Deadspin) – Do I think this is the latest sign of the apocalypse? Yes. However, do I also believe that there should be a statute enacted making it mandatory that every hospital in the State of Illinois provide an Illini version of this, whenever it is released, to go home with every baby? Absolutely.