{"id":191582,"date":"2026-02-24T16:29:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-24T16:29:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/191582\/"},"modified":"2026-02-24T16:29:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-24T16:29:07","slug":"for-sacramento-state-visions-of-football-glory-clouded-in-fuzzy-math","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/191582\/","title":{"rendered":"For Sacramento State, visions of football glory clouded in fuzzy math"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The USC<\/a> football schedule this year starts with a vacancy. The Trojans plan to welcome an opponent to be determined to the Coliseum on Aug. 29, and Sacramento State would love to be that opponent.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re trying,\u201d Sacramento State President Luke Wood said Monday.<\/p>\n

Wood announced last week that the Hornets had jumped into the Football Bowl Subdivision, the upper tier of NCAA Division I football, and what more glamorous way to make an FBS debut than against the most storied team in California?<\/p>\n

Wood called the Hornets\u2019 move to join the Mid-American Conference in football \u201ca calculated business decision that would provide our university with the greatest possible exposure.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, the $975 million he trumpeted in economic impact<\/a> over the next five years appears unsupported by a study from a consulting firm Wood thanked publicly<\/a>, primarily because of its reliance on a metric dismissed by experts as flawed and outdated for more than a decade.<\/p>\n

The metric is called advertising value equivalency<\/a> (AVE), cited by Collegiate Consulting in its study as the basis for the lion\u2019s share of the claimed economic impact: $600 million over five years from broadcast exposure. Sacramento State provided The Times with a copy of the study.<\/p>\n

In a post<\/a> on social media late Monday, Collegiate Consulting explained the figure Wood had instead announced for economic impact from broadcast exposure: $675 million over five years, citing what the firm said was the MAC average annual valuation of $135 million.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re trying to put a dollar value on something you don\u2019t easily have a price tag on,\u201d said Holy Cross economics professor Victor Matheson, past president of the North American Assn. of Sports Economists.<\/p>\n

Collegiate Consulting did not respond to messages seeking comment.<\/p>\n

The premise of AVE is simple: An advertisement has a cost, so the value of publicity in any form \u2014 say, dozens of references to Sacramento State in a three-hour ESPN game \u2014 can be calculated in relation to the cost of an ad.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe industry moved away from AVE<\/a> a long time ago,\u201d LINK said Sal Della Monica, executive vice president of strategic integration and marketing at Mike WorldWide, an international public relations firm. \u201cIt\u2019s absolutely outdated, and not a real indicator of economic value.\u201d<\/p>\n

If someone sees Sacramento State on TV, that\u2019s exposure. If someone then buys a ticket to a Sacramento State game, or enrolls at Sacramento State, that\u2019s economic impact.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe expect the exposure would generate revenue through corporate partners and ticket sales and merchandise, all those types of things,\u201d Sacramento State athletic director Mark Orr said, \u201cfrom national audiences seeing Sacramento State on their television.\u201d<\/p>\n

Said Matheson: \u201cThey\u2019re conflating appearing on TV and losing 52-7 to Bowling Green with a targeted ad designed to actually bring people to Sacramento to spend money and spend tuition dollars. They are conflating just being on TV with actual advertising.\u201d<\/p>\n

Della Monica said today\u2019s sophisticated metrics allow for economic impact to be traced to its source rather than broadly estimated in advance \u2014 for instance, if you bought a ticket based on a TV promotion that required a click to redeem.<\/p>\n

Isn\u2019t a televised football game in itself a three-hour advertisement for the school? Yes, but \u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cWe saw you on ESPN, and now we want to sponsor you?\u201d Della Monica said. \u201cThat isn\u2019t how sports sponsorships work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even Russell Wright, the founder of Collegiate Consulting, acknowledged to CBS Sports<\/a> that economic impact estimates by themselves are of limited use.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnless there\u2019s something actionable after the fact it\u2019s not really economic impact, it\u2019s more economic valuation,\u201d Wright said.<\/p>\n

Wright told CBS that Wood\u2019s $675 million estimate of broadcast-related economic impact was \u201cnot anywhere in our report.\u201d (It\u2019s not.) Wright also said Wood\u2019s $975 million estimate of total economic impact mischaracterized the study.<\/p>\n

Wood said he simply took the one-year estimate in the study and multiplied it to account for Sacramento State\u2019s five-year agreement with the MAC. He said he was baffled by Wright\u2019s comment.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wonder how that was asked of him,\u201d Wood said. \u201cOver five years is exactly what I said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m a professor. I\u2019ve done economic impact studies. Multiplying that number by five years is perfectly appropriate.\u201d<\/p>\n

That adjective would not apply to a public skirmish between the president of the university and the consultant that conducted the study commissioned by the university.<\/p>\n

Cal State campuses in Long Beach, Fullerton and Northridge dropped football to save money decades ago, and today each campus enrolls more students than Sacramento does. For Wood and Orr, the football upgrade in Sacramento nonetheless represents a play to increase enrollment \u2014 particularly from out-of-state students that pay higher tuition \u2014 and engage a region with almost 3 million residents and limited sports options.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s us and the Kings,\u201d Wood said.<\/p>\n

UC Riverside, in a larger metropolitan area<\/a>, also dropped football long ago but jumped into Division I and the Big West Conference for its sports in 2000. The school billed itself as the Inland Empire\u2019s Division I home team, but community and donor support languished, and the basketball teams still play in a student-funded gym designed as a student recreation center.<\/p>\n

Wood envisions crowds of 20,000 in a new or renovated stadium, at a cost estimated in the study from $171 million to $300 million. Sponsorship revenue is up 300 percent, Orr said \u2013 to $1.7 million.<\/p>\n

Orr said the models are Boise State and James Madison, not USC.<\/p>\n

What the Hornets want from USC is not a rivalry, just the $1 million or so the school would pay Sacramento State for what the Trojans would assume would be an easy win. The Hornets\u2019 budget cannot work without those kinds of games, year in and year out.<\/p>\n

There is a narrow but viable lane to success here, but the chances decrease as talk of profits and losses outpaces talk of wins and losses.<\/p>\n

Sacramento State is running a deficit. The athletic department is paying<\/a> $23 million over five years to move its football team into the MAC and paying travel costs for league opponents to play in Sacramento. Student fees and university funds subsidize intercollegiate sports; those two sources comprised 87% of Sacramento State\u2019s 2024 athletic budget, according to Knight Center data<\/a>. (The average figure for MAC schools: 66%.)<\/p>\n

The skeptics only get louder with billion-dollar claims of economic impact.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy usual rule of thumb is, move the decimal point one place to the left,\u201d Matheson said. \u201cBut, man, when it comes to this advertising stuff, probably move it two or three.\u201d<\/p>\n

The way Wood sees it, it might be an audacious vision, but why not? Nowhere else in America<\/a> can you find a media market so large with neither an NFL nor an FBS team.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we were in any other part of the country, what we are doing would not work,\u201d Wood said.<\/p>\n

In this one? Check back in five years. In the meantime, they\u2019ll fight on, particularly for that USC check.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The USC football schedule this year starts with a vacancy. The Trojans plan to welcome an opponent to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":191583,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[44394,89888,89887,1750,8692,949,17823,89889,89886,121,123,122,5481,4743,2822,1816,43519,72],"class_list":["post-191582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sacramento","tag-ave","tag-broadcast-exposure","tag-collegiate-consulting","tag-cost","tag-economic-impact","tag-football","tag-hornets","tag-ncaa-division","tag-russell-wright","tag-sacramento","tag-sacramento-headlines","tag-sacramento-news","tag-sacramento-state","tag-study","tag-tv","tag-university","tag-wood","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191582"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191582\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/191583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}