If you look at what ESPN was paying everyone in a snapshot in an old alignment, and then what the new alignment would have been paid on that price (to eliminate the fact that it's just inflation of negotiations and not real value).
ESPN:
- lost USC, UCLA, Washington and Oregon to FOX.
- lost Washington St and Oregon St completely
- added UAB, FAU, Charlotte, North Texas, Rice and UTSA.
- devalued the schedule and traditions.
- spend an additional $135 million in "old alignment" money to do it.
That's with "old value money," and when you apply new value money, it's actually kind of worse, because they gave the SEC so freaking much.
The ONLY benefit ESPN gets from doing this is negotiating with fewer people/conferences, so they run less risk of losing someone who's good in a given year. They're eliminating the risk of losing one of the best conferences to another network, which is smart...
HOWEVER, in order to accomplish this, they had to push the narrative that the SEC is the best an everyone else sucks. And by doing so, pissed off the Big Ten so they went to FOX.
If the kept college sports as SEVEN major conferences that were near equals, they'd have risked losing 1/7th of the sports power if they lost ONE conference.
But by devaluing conferences 3-10 and merging them down from SEVEN major to FOUR, they lost the #2 conference, which is now way more value than 1/7th the major seven.