Tennessee football: ESPN’s SEC rights a further blow to Vols’ recruiting edge

The new Southeastern Conference deal hurts the Tennessee football Volunteers.

Prepare for Tennessee football and the rest of the SEC to have a permanent home on ESPN. The league and the television network announced a 10-year deal beginning in 2024-2025, giving ESPN and ABC exclusive rights to broadcast all SEC football and basketball games.

That includes the game of the week and potentially multiple games per Saturday in football moving from CBS to ABC. Also, the premier football game will be in the evening now instead of the afternoon. Given the SEC Network’s current partnership with ESPN, this just completes a full transition that has clearly been in the works.

So how does this affect the Vols? Well, truth be told, it will raise the basketball profile along with the rest of the league. However, Tennessee football just suffered another blow to the advantage it had over other SEC schools in recruiting.

A staple of the football program when it was a powerhouse was the ability to recruit more national than other programs in the SEC. One huge reason for that was simply a budgetary advantage. The Vols’ fan base brought in a lot of money.

That allowed the program to spend more on recruiting and gain a facilities and stadium advantage to lure more big-name talent. However, as the league struck new, bigger television deals, revenue sharing naturally lessened that budget advantage. The more it happened, the further the program slid. These aren’t coincidences.

During Phillip Fulmer’s last three years as head coach on Rocky Top, USA TODAY reported in 2019 that the Vols were the only school in the SEC with a recruiting budget of over $1 million per year. ESPN and SEC inked a 15-year $2 billion deal that began the year after he was fired.

Since then the football program has had even more of a downward slide, one that anybody can see. That same USA TODAY report showed that the Vols were one of three SEC schools to have a recruiting budget of over $2 million in 2019, and they were behind the Alabama Crimson Tide and the Georgia Bulldogs.

See what happened? UT’s recruiting budget increased, but so did the rest of the league’s, and that allowed other schools to catch up. Striking another major television deal will only further hurt this advantage for Rocky Top.

Consider the details right now. That SEC contract we just mentioned is still going on, and it’s worth $133.3 million a year. Meanwhile, Ralph Russo of AP News reports that the league’s current deal with is $55 million a year. That’s worth nearly $190 million a year total.

Well, Russo reports that this deal with ESPN will be worth over $300 million a year. So there’s a nearly $100 million increase in revenue for the league and a major portion of that will be distributed evenly throughout the schools. All of a sudden, the Vols just lost a bigger advantage in their recruiting budget, as they’ve already fallen behind other schools.

In case you’re interested, The New York Times reports that this deal with CBS dates back to 2001, when the league first carried the SEC Championship game. Before that, there was a five-year deal worth about $20 million a year that began in 1996, according to another New York Times report from 1994.

See what’s happening here? As the budgets got bigger, revenue sharing went up for all schools, and Tennessee football’s advantage got smaller. The last year the Vols have finished in the top 10 was that 2001 season.

Other schools were able to use that extra revenue to hire better coaches, upgrade their facilities, increase their stadium sizes and yes, focus more heavily on recruiting. The results for many of them have shown.

Simply put, every new deal that lifts up other SEC schools hurts UT. Now, if they want to be elite again, they’ll have to find another way. By the time this deal goes into effect, the Mississippi State Bulldogs, Ole Miss Rebels, Missouri Tigers and Vanderbilt Commodores will all be recruiting as national as the Vols.

So what’s the move? We don’t know if Jeremy Pruitt or Phillip Fulmer will be in their current roles by 2024-2025. However, it’s time now for everybody to start thinking of another way for Tennessee football to gain an advantage. The recruiting advantage that other states have isn’t there, and now, neither is the budget. These next few years will define the program’s future.