ESPN pays UT $300mm over 20 years, which is $15mm per year on AVERAGE, but we know from the public release of the documents, that the payments are back end loaded. Actual payments to UT are $10.7mm per year increasing by 3% annually. To put that in perspective, Florida gets $9mm per yr from selling it's Tier 3 rights. And I'm guessing UF's Tier 1+2 TV revenues are greater than Texass' by more than $1.7mm. Which at least from a football perspective means Texass is NOT the top grossing CFB program from a TV rights standpoint.
Of course it's still a lot of money. And Texass has other revenue sources as well. But the real issue for Texass is that the LHN business model is not sustainable. Florida gets $9mm for selling its Tier 3 rights and its business partners (Sunshine) make money. Texass gets $10.7mm for selling its Tier 3 rights and its business partners lose $26mm per year. If Texass wants to be myopic, it can simply say, "Who cares? I'm still getting my 10.7 million". But does anyone really think the competing Tier 3 models (BTN, P12 regional, SEC's individual deals) are going to grow by only 3% per year? BTN, which distributed $7mm per school for its Tier 3 product, has already come out and projected 18% annual revenue growth for the next 5 years. Which means that in a few years, podunk Northwestern will be making more from its Tier 3 rights than Texass. Ponder on that for a moment.
Absinthe hit the nail on the head - Texass needs to have LHN start generating some revenues because otherwise Texass is locked into a long term contract that will be grossly inferior to what other schools are getting. The problem is that before LHN can start distributing a profit stream to its owners, it must cover that gaping $26mm burn rate. It's NOT going to happen. And that is the problem with a single school network: the business has too many fixed costs - you must be able to spread those costs over a lot of schools/events or else you drown under the cost base.