SI: Measuring Each Power 5 School’s Conference Value

While looking for something else, I came across this article on Sports Illustrated. It basically ranks P5 schools based on who would be most desirable for conference expansion.

I'm not really all that interested in conference expansion, but what I liked about the article is how the ranking includes a mix of football and non-football factors to rank each team's desirability. Many here were talking about the importance of academics and/or non-revenue sports in the multiple threads on expansion and future B1G members, so I thought this would be of interest to the board.

The different components of the SI aggregate ranking were:

1. "Football ranking: This is a five-year average of the Sagarin ratings from 2017 to ’21"
2. "Academic ranking: This is simply the most recent U.S. News & World Report’s national universities rankings, released in 2021"
3. "All-sports ranking: This is the Learfield Directors’ Cup Division I standings for the 2021–22 academic year"
4. "Football attendance: This was an average of home-game attendance (via NCAA data) from 2017 to ’21, tossing out ’20 since that season was heavily impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic"
5. "Broadcast viewership: This was the total number of football games that drew one million or more viewers: from 2017 to ’21, also tossing out ’20"

Based on this index, the top-10 most desirable teams (with the individual component scores and overall score) were:

Other B1G teams of interest in the top-25: PSU (11), MSU (20), Iowa (21).

In terms of overall conferences, as expected the SEC and B1G have the highest average scores for all teams (25.1 and 25.8, respectively) with a pretty large drop for the ACC (39.6), (Pac-12 41.4), Big 12 (49.3).

Additional Analysis
As a quick side project, I thought it would be interesting to take these data and see how heavily the football and non-football components weigh on each team's overall ranking. Who are the well-rounded teams, who are the football factories, and which schools are, well, not so good at stuff? Just kidding. For this purpose, I created a separate measure for each team's average score for the football factors (football ranking, football attendance, broadcast viewership) and non-football factors (academic ranking and all-sports rankings). I then plotted each school along these two dimensions. 

Keep in mind that lower scores on each dimension are better. The quadrants can be thought of like this:

• Lower-left quadrant: balanced in terms of football and non-football factors (You want to be here).
• Top-left quadrant: score is heavily influenced by non-football factors.
• Bottom-right quadrant: football factories.
• Top-right quadrant: Cave! Hic Dragones (You don't want to be there).

The first graph plots the top-25 in the SI desirability rankings. Teams are color-coded by conference (I included ND in the ACC).

Michigan, Notre Dame, and UT stand out as pretty balanced teams. OSU and UGA's scores are more driven by football, but still within the respectable range on the non-football dimensions. This visualization also shows that USC will be a pretty good grab for the B1G. As it stands, the B1G has 4/8 teams (with the addition of USC) in this quadrant. If we could pick off ND, then we'd have 5/8. Not too shabby.

Moving away from the most desirable quadrant. Stanford's ranking, as you might have guessed, is pretty heavily driven by non-football factors, as is the other newest member of the B1G (UCLA). Also no surprise that Bama is pretty much the football factoryist of the football factories. Miami and Tenessee? Haha. 

The next graph includes all P5 teams (not just the top-25). Sorry about the small label sizes and I hope they are readable. I had to reduce them to avoid overlap and a really messy appearance.  

I'll let you draw your own conclusions from these graphs. But I'll just say: holy shit, the Big 12 is screwed when UT and OU leave. All teams will be either in the lower-right quadrant (football factories) or top-right (don't go there!). Picking up BYU, UCF, Cinci, and Houston are just going to add to the overall weakness of the conference.

That's all I've got. Any surprises here? Any teams that you'd definitely like to grab if the B1G were to expand? Do these results change your minds about any teams?