Arizona Basketball:T.J. McConnell is worth Nearly $1 Mill!

Arizona Basketball: The guys at NerdWallet.com provided their annual rankings of teams and players in NCAA Basketball and the University of Arizona is sitting in the No. 2 spot!

I just finished reading a fascinating NerdWallet.com article titled “March Madness? Top NCAA Players Worth $488,000.” The study, in its second year, was based on the 2013-14 NCAA basketball season. I was fascinated and flabbergasted by just the sheer amounts of the revenue that the NCAA schools and teams pulled in last year: $1.6 billion!

The article was written by Sreekar Jasthi, a Strategy Analyst at NerdWallet, I had a chance to catch up with him to gain more insight into how he went about this study. He said, “I don’t typically write about this stuff. I am interested in the conversation of collegiate athletics and the amount of money that’s invested and made, especially in basketball as well as football. We wanted to put that spin on this particular subject.”

He explained that he adopted the NBA Revenue Share calculations and determined that the average value of a player at a top 25-ranked school is $488,000, which is about $20,000 less than the least NBA salary.

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The revenue figures used represent gross revenue and were obtained from the Department of Education. Gross revenue would include ticket revenue, advertising revenue, TV deals, merchandising and more. I am thinking for the University of Arizona, the merchandising revenue must be huge! But maybe that’s because my family’s closets are full of red, white and blue Wildcat gear (annual budget between the four of us at around $1000)?

Let’s get right into the juicy details…What Jasthi did was to take the gross revenue and the total number of players each team has on their roster (Arizona has 14, Louisville, Kentucky, Wichita State and West Virginia all have 16), along with the contribution rating or Win Shares* of each starter and calculated Revenue share or worth by team and player.

For Arizona, he picked two guards (T.J. McConnell and Rondae Hollis-Jefferson), two forwards (Brandon Ashley and Stanley Johnson) and a Center (Kaleb Tarczweski). Arizona ranked extremely high among the top 25 highest ranked teams according to the Associate Press:

2013-14 Total Revenue – Arizona is No. 2 at $27.5 million behind $40.6 Million for Louisville, Duke is in third place with $27.0 million.

2013-14 Total Revenue to players– Arizona again is No. 2 at $13.8 million behind $20.3 Million for No. 1 Louisville and $13.5million for No. 3 Duke.

2013-14 Average Revenue per player – Arizona is No. 3 at $982,800 behind $1.3 Million for No. 1 Louisville, and No. 2 Duke with $1.1 million.

The following chart displays values from the 2013-14 season for the top 25 schools (note the table toggles, pretty cool, there are actually four charts included, use the drop down box to view):

Now let’s talk about the NCAA players’ value. If the players/students were to actually be paid what they were worth to the school, and this is now a subject of much debate and controversy, what would they be paid? Jashti calculated their estimated pay based on calculations similar to the NBA Revenue sharing calculations.

Our very own Arizona Wildcat T.J. McConnell came in as the fourth highest valued player in the country overall. According to NerdWallet, McConnell is worth $2,159,153!  Almost half of Louisville’s Montrezl Harrell‘s $4+ Million, but not too shabby.

Via:NerdWallet

Note: Average player value = (2013-14 total team revenue * 50%)/number of players on roster

I asked Sreekar how he determined how much each player “contributed,” here is his answer: “We used Win Shares* stats, which is a composite statistic is for every player, the number of wins a player has contributed to his team depending on offensive and defensive statistic’s.”

Sreekar wanted us to note that as of this point in the season, Johnson, McConnell, and Hollis-Jefferson all have equal Win Shares, “McConnell made it in essentially because the guard spot was weaker in NCAA, guards aren’t contributing as much as big men and forwards, and this is because the point guards do a lot of passing,” like our own floor general.

Let’s get this straight; T.J. McConnell is one of the most valuable players to Arizona and in the Nation, both in pulling in revenue and his success at playing in the point guard position. In addition, and definitely correlated, Arizona has higher gross revenue figure than Kentucky, Duke, Wisconsin and Ohio State, just to name a few.

Feb 21, 2015; Tucson, AZ, USA; Arizona Wildcats assistant coaches Damon Stoudamire Book Richardson , forward Brandon Ashley (21) , forward Rondae Hollis-Jefferson (23) , center Kaleb Tarczewski (35) and guard Parker Jackson-Cartwright (0) cheer from the bench after scoring against the UCLA Bruins during the first half at McKale Center. Mandatory Credit: Casey Sapio-USA TODAY Sports

I know our Wildcat fans are “the best fans in the nation” as Coach Sean Miller always reminds us, and we also feel we have a great team. Well folks, we can now legitimately say we are a high performing, highly lucrative NCAA College basketball team, at least based on this study. #BEARDOWN4INDY

Note:

Nerdwallet.com is a personal finance website, which has tools and content designed to help people make better choices on finances. Articles are written about economics, where should people live and others to help people make decisions through data analysis. Follow the author and NerdWallet on twitter: @sreekonomics @nerdwallet

*Win Shares is an estimate of how many team wins a player has contributed to. According to Sports-Reference.com, they based their calculation on baseball’s Bill James calculation. The Win Shares for basketball uses a few different principles: one win is equivalent to one Win Share instead of three and a player can have negative Win Shares. To get a players total Win Shares, you would have to add Offensive to the Defensive Win Shares

Next: Click HERE for more on Arizona and March Madness!