Anyone living on the right side of a rock the past couple of years knows that the success of the Wichita State men’s basketball team created an unprecedented level of national awareness about the Shockers.

National television outlets such as ESPN and CBS went out of their way to educate sports fans about the Cinderella team with the silly wheat mascot since last March.

The WSU Department of Sports Management wanted to quantify all the media exposure, so it conducted a study to estimate how much it was worth to the university. The findings suggest the team generated around $555 million worth of media exposure for WSU during the 2012-2013 season.

Mike Ross, an instructor who helped carry out the study, made it clear this is not cash coming to the university. Instead, it’s the amount of money it would have had to spend to get the brand outreach it achieved with the Final Four run last year.

“This is not money that the school will be receiving,” Ross said. “We wanted to look at putting a value on the national media exposure that was gained over the course of last year.”

The study measured the supposed monetary value of all of the television airtime, published articles and online hits generated during and immediately after the Shockers’ run to the 2013 NCAA Final Four.

The media exposure during the team’s historic undefeated 2013-14 season was not included in this phase of the ongoing study.

Ross said $555 million is around twice the amount of money the university has in its yearly operating budget, meaning the men’s basketball team provided a marketing boost the school may never see again.

“The basketball team provided the university with a unique set of exposures that they are not going to be able to recreate, ever,” Ross said. “With the amount of eyeballs that are on that tournament, and especially on the Final Four, it certainly opens some doors to the university that they may not have been able to reach.”

Barth Hague, chief marketing officer, agrees that WSU could never gain that kind of outreach on its own.

“One of the things it helps us do is to talk about the university to an audience beyond the Wichita metro area and have people recognize us,” Hague said. “We couldn’t ever begin to pay for that level of brand awareness.”

While the awareness has certainly put WSU on the map for many people around the country, Ross and Hague said it is impossible to measure what, if any, tangible affects the basketball team’s success made on campus. For example, admissions applications could increase, but it would be difficult to determine what would cause that with more going on at WSU than just good basketball.

Even so, Hague said any awareness helps.

“Students generally don’t choose a school based on the success of its basketball team, but they may look at you,” Hague said. “That could result, down the road, in more students here, but I don’t think anyone is banking on that right now.”

Ross also looked at the Shockers’ Final Four run last year as a long, heavily discounted, primetime television advertisement that could keep WSU in the national consciousness for years to come.

“It puts the university in a different spotlight,” Ross said. “I think the university does some things to get national recognition here and there, but none of those things are going to buy you 90 minutes on CBS and primetime television on a Saturday night.”