You made two great points, the only schools that bring fans to JTS are UT, OU and KSU, the rest of the conference might bring a few hundred at most. The majority of the games its just ISU fans. 21st in attendence, which places us right behind EIU which was 20th.
2nd point when you read about the value of the teams tv ratings a little closer, the data was taken from the 2018 and 2019 season, FOX and ESPN chose either OU or UT for 33 of the 38 games to be broadcast on the main network. Well games on the main network always out draw teams on the side networks, so you are really not comparing the same thing. Look at any week of games and the games on the major networks always outdraw the secondary games on BTN or ESPN's other channels. After looking at the numbers its not as bad as the numbers look, it would be interesting to see how the 5 games that did not include either UT or OU drew for ratings. Without those numbers we really cannot make a good comparison to the value of the other 8 schools.
Also important to note trends. ISU's attendance and TV trends are positive while CFB as a whole are not good.
Basically ad value for a team comes down to how popular the team is. TV and attendance give us that. Sure, there are some teams where attendance doesn't correlate great with their brand value, but that argument probably only holds water with Miami and USC. Not sure it applies with anybody else.
Also, I don't think AD budget is a valid metric. Most of it is media contracts, which is driven by the big dogs in the conference they're in. The rest is donations, which they aren't redistributing. Donations enable a school to maybe endure some worse conference entry conditions, but that's it.
What attendance and TV viewership suggests that in terms of media value:
- The bottom half to 1/3 of the ACC and PAC are really low value.
- The B10s top (OSU, UM, PSU) are great, the mid-tier is solid, the bottom 5 or so are bad.
If these metrics are reasonable indicators, ISU would be a mid-tier Big 10 team, and mid-upper PAC or ACC team.
I know that people have whatever outdated feelings about "brand," but actual metrics suggest ISU is more valuable than a lot of teams considered to be safe, and ISU is trending in the right direction.
Two final caveats:
1. The old cable satellite "market size" value is going away, but it's not gone yet. So that is a negative, particularly in the near-term for ISU.
2. We know that football is the driver, but MBB viewership and valuable still is a factor in the total media contracts. Despite ISU sucking for two years, it still delivers above average value here.
