Guy, you made a good point earlier that the SEC/ESPN also depend on college football outside of the SEC. That's true, but only to an extent. They don't need any of the other conferences to flourish, and indeed, can't be expected to expend any effort to that end. Absent any other parties with influence, they need only that the NCAA College Football landscape be alive so as to present an external prop with which its SEC teams can, on occasion, interact.
Well thanks for complimenting me on making a good point, but the rest of your post seems to ignore it. ESPN absolutely needs the other conferences to flourish, and this is based on the simple math of advertising, viewership and U.S. population distribution. You can't talk about ESPN making the SEC a business decision, then ignore how the broadcast industry actually works.
I'm reminded of the broadcasting execs who studied the demographics of the Howard Stern show, and found out that the people who said they hated Howard Stern listened to his show longer and more frequently than the people who said they loved him.
