Dayton’s Elite Eight run worth 72 million dollars to the school
By Jack Maloney
Every year in the NCAA Tournament we get plenty of upsets. Usually these weed themselves out by the Sweet Sixteen, but once in a while a low seed keeps on going. We saw it recently with VCU, and this year we saw it with the University of Dayton, who advanced to the Elite Eight as an 11-seed.
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In the first round they squeaked by Ohio State, followed it up with a second round win upset against the three seed, Syracuse, and finally picked up a Sweet Sixteen win over Stanford. In the Elite Eight they fell short to a far superior Florida team. It was a great, unexpected run from the Atlantic 10 school.
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And according to new reports, it earned them a whole lot of money–more specifically about 72 million dollars. A study done by the Dayton City Commission looked at a number of things, focusing mostly on television and social media exposure.
"This estimate reflects television clips from news outlets, syndicated television programs and sports analyses, as well as actual game play. The game play value is estimated at $36.7 million; clips from cable and network television brought a combined value of $34.5 million. Social media exposure was harder to gauge. We used a best practice valuation of ¢0.005 for Twitter impressions and $2.4 for a tagged Facebook post. Together, the publicity value for Facebook and Twitter is $726,321. The total estimated value: $72,660,482."
Now this isn’t 72 million in cash headed straight to the school’s pocket, but rather what they estimate they’ll earn through sales of merchandise, new kids applying to the school, etc. Hey, plenty of schools turn sports success into major improvements for the school in multiple areas. Good for Dayton if they’re able to do that.