Report: ESPN to lose millions in ad sales with no college football

The sports network is closely tied to college football and has a lot of revenue coming through the game.

ESPN could see some major financial trouble if there is no college football.

Per Sportico, the sports network could lose up to $793 million in advertising sales if the popular fall sport is not played.

Last year ESPN’s family of networks televised 282 games and sold $792.5 million in ads, according to Standard Media Index. To put that in perspective, ESPN’s NFL package only generated $314.8 million. Those numbers don’t include the college games televised by ESPN’s ACC Network and SEC Network, nor the plethora of other matchups streamed on ESPN+, its digital service, which costs $5 per month and is popular among football fans.

The sheer scale of the company’s college football business will create a lot of headaches, and lost revenue, if the season is further disrupted. The Big Ten and Pac-12 have already nixed early-season games and some smaller conferences, like the Ivy League (an ESPN+ partner), have cancelled fall sports altogether. The NCAA’s board of governors meets Friday and could vote to cancel all NCAA-sponsored fall sports.

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Should college football’s doomsday scenario comes true, ESPN will have to negotiate make-goods for ad buyers, and sort hundreds of millions in rights payments it owes to schools, conference and bowl properties. Unwinding that billion-dollar web of payments will be a Herculean task.

“ESPN’s business in college sports, and primarily college football, is an actual ecosystem,” said Dan Cohen, who leads Octagon’s media rights consulting division. “And a lot of their business is organic, as opposed to inorganic. Buying rights to Major League Baseball, then selling ads and securing affiliate deals off that content is inorganic, it’s a transactional piece of business. When you own bowl games, and when you own networks, that becomes a business unit in and of itself.”

With so much money invested in college football including the SEC Network, the company would likely lose all of the ad sales and, perhaps, have to go through a round of layoffs or furloughs with employees.

SEC presidents and chancellors will meet virtually on Thursday, July 30 to likely discuss how the football season will be played.