CIAA Leads Black College Conferences in 2008 Revenues
There’s no great surprise that the CIAA reigns supreme among the four HBCU athletic conferences in revenue bearing power. Between the masterful job the conference does with the CIAA Basketball Tournament, and the overwhelming history that continues to resonate with transplanted fans, the CIAA has a regional and emotional lock on their sports and fan bases that the MEAC, SWAC and SIAC just don’t have.
Here are the numbers on income for each conference, as reported by TSPNSports.com.
HBCU Conference 2008 Revenues
CIAA – $6,512,989.00
MEAC – $5,929,689.00
SWAC -$4,859,155.00
SIAC – $1,420,811.00
To be fair, the CIAA enjoys a several advantages that the other conferences don’t. Their better teams are stationed between Virginia and North Carolina; a stone’s throw away for supporters wishing to travel to conference championships and road rivalry games. It goes without saying that their tenure as the oldest black college conference resonates with fans and sponsors, and the conference schools, for the most part, leverage technology and marketing pretty well.
As for the MEAC and SWAC, you wonder if five and four million respectively is indeed, their earning potential? It would be too easy to write it off as a lack of marketing savvy, slipshod communications with stakeholders, and an lazy approach to earning new fans as mid-major athletics. But fans can bear some responsibility in this as well. If fans made attendance at football and basketball games on par with other mid-major programs, perhaps the MEAC and SWAC would be better positioned to get sponsorship opportunities. And if they can bring in more money, they can get better coaches, players, facilities, etc.
So it’s a cycle that leads to underachievement at both ends of the spectrum. And unfortunately, neither side cares enough to change anything.
As for the SIAC, it’s a shame that so many tradition-rich institutions have virtually no marketing push beyond Georgia and Alabama. Football is entrenched in enough rivalries across the country to overcome the lack of appeal out of the conference. Basketball wise, they are fortunate that the SWAC exceeds them in basketball apathy. Just over a million dollars? There’s a lot of work to do for a conference riding the strength of three athletic name brands.
Each conference has strengths and weaknesses relative to their revenue bearing ability. By far, the CIAA is the standard bearer for leveraging history and product with contemporary sports appeal. The MEAC, SWAC and SIAC have quite a ways to go to capture this kind of magic, but perhaps they are each a solid marketing campaign away from realizing a larger portion of their earning power.
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