For Sacramento State, visions of football glory are shrouded in mysterious statistics

USC’s football program this year starts with a gap. The Trojans plan to welcome a strong opponent to the Coliseum on Aug. 29, and Sacramento State would love to be that opponent.

“We’re trying,” Sacramento State President Luke Wood said Monday.

Wood announced last week that the Hornets were making the jump to the Soccer Bowl Subdivision, the top division of NCAA Division I football, and what better way to make an FBS debut than with a storied team in California?

Wood called the Hornets’ move to join the Mid-American Conference in football “a calculated business decision that would give our university as much exposure as possible.”

However, the $975 million in economic impact he claims over the next five years appears to be unsupported by a study by consulting firm Wood publicly praised, largely due to reliance on a metric dismissed by experts as flawed and out of date for more than a decade.

The metric is called advertising value equivalence (AVE), which was cited by Collegiate Consulting in its research as the basis for a large share of the requested economic impact: $600 million in five years from broadcast exposure. Sacramento State provided The Times with a copy of the study.

In a post on social media late Monday, Collegiate Consulting outlined a figure Wood instead announced for the economic impact of the broadcast: $675 million over five years, citing what the company said is MAC’s annual average of $135 million.

“You’re trying to put a dollar value on something that doesn’t easily have a value,” said Holy Cross economics professor Victor Matheson, former president of the North American Assn. of Sports Economists.

Collegiate Consulting did not respond to messages seeking comment.

The premise of AVE is simple: An ad has a cost, so the value of advertising in any form — say, a bunch of Sacramento State highlights in a three-hour ESPN game — can be calculated relative to the cost of the ad.

“The industry moved away from AVE a long time ago,” said LINK Sal Della Monica, senior vice president of strategic integration and marketing at Mike WorldWide, an international public relations firm. “It’s completely out of date, and not a true indicator of economic value.”

If someone sees Sacramento State on TV, that’s exposure. When someone then buys a ticket to a Sacramento State game, or enrolls at Sacramento State, that has an economic impact.

“We expect the exposure to generate revenue through corporate partners and ticket and merchandise sales, all those types of things,” said Sacramento State athletic director Mark Orr, “to a national audience that sees Sacramento State on their televisions.”

Said Matheson: “They’re comparable to being on TV and losing 52-7 to Bowling Green with a targeted ad designed to bring people to Sacramento to spend money and spend education dollars. They’re just combining being on TV with real advertising.”

Della Monica said that today’s sophisticated metrics allow the economic impact to be tracked at its source rather than broadly estimated in advance – for example, if you bought a ticket based on a TV promotion that requires a click to use.

Isn’t the televised football game itself a three-hour advertisement for the school? Yes, but…

“We saw it on ESPN, and now we want to sponsor it?” Della Monica said. “That’s not how sports funding works.”

Even Russell Wright, founder of Collegiate Consulting, admitted to CBS Sports that economic impact estimates themselves have limited use.

“Unless there’s something that might happen after that it’s not really an economic impact, it’s an economic balancing act,” Wright said.

Wright told CBS that Wood’s estimate of $675 million in economic impact related to broadcasting “is nowhere in our report.” (Not really.) Wright also said that Wood’s estimate of $975 million in total economic impact misrepresented the study.

Wood said he simply took the one-year estimate from the study and multiplied it to match Sacramento State’s five-year deal with the MAC. He said he was confused by Wright’s comments.

“I wonder how that was asked of him,” Wood said. “For more than five years, that’s exactly what I’ve been saying.

“I’m a professor. I’ve studied economics. Multiplying that number over five years is appropriate.”

That comment would not apply to a public dispute between a university president and a university-commissioned research consultant.

Cal State’s Long Beach, Fullerton and Northridge campuses dropped football to save money decades ago, and today each campus enrolls more students than Sacramento. For Wood and Orr, the development of football in Sacramento nevertheless represents a game to increase enrollment – especially for out-of-state students who pay higher tuition – and share a region with nearly 3 million residents and limited sports options.

“It’s us and the Kings,” said Wood.

UC Riverside, in the metropolitan area, also gave up football long ago but made the jump to Division I and the Big West Conference with its games in 2000. The school billed itself as the Inland Empire’s Division I home team, but public and donor support dwindled, and the basketball teams still played in a student-funded gym designed as a student recreation center.

Wood envisions crowds of 20,000 in a new or renovated stadium, at an estimated cost of $171 million to $300 million. Sponsorship income increased 300 percent, Orr said — to $1.7 million.

Orr said the models are Boise State and James Madison, not USC.

What the Hornets want from USC is no contest, just $1 million or the school will pay Sacramento State for what the Trojans would think would be an easy win. The Hornets’ budget can’t function without those types of games, year in and year out.

There is a narrow path to success here, but the odds are slimmed down as the talk of profit and loss outweighs the talk of winning and losing.

Sacramento State has a deficit. The athletic department is paying $23 million over five years to move its football team to the MAC and pay the travel expenses of league opponents to play in Sacramento. Student fees and university fees support intercollegiate sports; those two sources comprise 87% of Sacramento State’s 2024 athletics budget, according to Knight Center data. (Average figure for MAC schools: 66%.)

Skeptics only get louder with claims of billions of dollars in economic impact.

“My general rule of thumb is, move the decimal point one place to the left,” Matheson said. “But, man, when it comes to this publicity thing, maybe take it off two or three times.”

The way Wood sees it, it might be a smart idea, but why not? Nowhere else in America can you find such a large media market without an NFL or FBS team.

“If we were in another part of the country, what we’re doing wouldn’t work,” said Wood.

In this one? Check back in five years. For now, they’ll keep fighting, especially that USC check.