...here's one recent example in Pac 10 country no less. Just after UTah's BCS busting season they went to UCLA to play the Bruins in 2006 at the Rose Bowl. a little over 59,000 showed up. The following year in 2007, BYU went to play UCLA in teh Rose Bowl and 73000 showed up. I watched the game on TV and the BYU crowd at the game was very vocal and commentators kept mentioning that it sounded like a BYU home game. These weren't fans from Provo/Orem driving out there, it was BYU fans in teh SoCal area who went to the game because it was BYU (and didn't attend the year before when it was Utah).

When you do some loose calculations of the revenue difference that was generated by having BYU there, it's huge. I don't know the price for a ticket or parking, etc for the Rose Bowl but based off of what I spent the last time I went to a game in Provo I spent roughly $300 for 4 nose bleed section seats, about $60 at concessions and another $50 in souvenirs. I can't remember what I paid in parking but the total bill came to around $400 for the 4 of us, or $100 a person. So using that as a guide a rough estimate is the extra 14000 fans that BYU brought out to the game grossed an additional $1.4 million in revenue (very conservative estimate).

That's huge $$$ and BYU does that all the time. We filled up TCU's stadium for them the last time we played there and were such a good draw in the grand opening of the new Dallas Cowboys stadium when we spanked Oklahoma that we've been invited back for another gig to play TCU there this next season. ESPN has also hooked us up with a game on the east coast to play in the Wash Redskins home field, Fed-Ex Field and now Nebraska, Wisconsin and other Big 10 schools are lining up to play us (Ohio St is working on a Home/away/neutral game series with us). I've even read where ESPN is working on a deal to put BYU in a game at the new Yankees Stadium versus an east coast opponent (rumors are Rutgers or maybe Army).

I don't see any network or major programs taking this level of interest in the Utes because it's not financially feasible. That's why Utah's only option for financial viability was to huddle together with a lot of other programs. There's only a small number of football powers that have the financial might to pull of what BYU has done. We're talking the uber-elite schools like Texas (which is in the process of copying BYU with their own network and TV deal), USC (which is also seriously in the discussion phase of following suit), Oklahoma, Ohio St, Florida, Alabama, etc.