College athletics is in another realignment phase, with the news breaking late Thursday that USC and UCLA are set to make a move to the Big Ten, portending the possible end of the road for the ACC.
More on the gloom and doom there in a moment.
First, to today’s news with USC and UCLA, which, after last summer’s bombshell that has Texas and Oklahoma on their way to the SEC, would seem to foretell a slimming down of the Power 5 to a Power 2, and thus additional moving and shaking from what would be the leftovers from among the ACC, Big 12 and Pac-12.
At the heart of it all: yeah, it’s the money, stupid.
In the case of USC, UCLA and the Pac-12, the grant of media rights for Pac-12 members is tied to the conference’s current TV deal, which expires at the end of the 2023-2024 academic sports year.
Why they’d want to move is obvious when you look at the numbers. According to the research firm Navigate, Pac-12 members are projected to get payouts valued at $34.4 million in calendar-year 2022, and looking ahead to 2029 would get a projected $56.5 million per school.
Big Ten schools, per Navigate, will get a projected $57.2 million in 2022, increasing to $94.5 million by 2029.
That’s still behind the SEC, which, benefitting from the additions of Texas and Oklahoma, will overtake the Big Ten in per-school payouts by 2026, according to Navigate’s projections, and by 2029 will pay out $105.3 million per school.
Those projections, it should be noted, were done back in March. The Big Ten would undoubtedly grow in interest and cachet, and thus value, by adding the Los Angeles TV market to its media landscape.
Which gets us to the ACC, which actually brings up the rear in conference payouts in the Power 5, according to the Navigate projections, at $30.9 million per school in 2022, increasing to $55.3 million in 2029, little more than half the annual payouts to SEC member schools.
Can the ACC survive in this changing landscape? More to the point, can the member schools survive given the changes that are going on all around?
If you’re UVA, for instance, what do you do if, say, Clemson decides to up and leave for the SEC, or North Carolina and Duke bolt for the Big Ten?
Any move by a current ACC member would not be all that easy, given that the member schools all signed on to a grant of media rights agreement that, in essence, would give the ACC their TV revenues if they were to leave the conference before 2036.
How enforceable those contracts are is up to question. No doubt a school looking to make a move that it considers to be in its best interest financially would be willing to take the matter to court. The likely endgame there would be a negotiated settlement that would have the school paying in the eight, maybe low nine figures range to get out.
But it wouldn’t be as simple as that for everybody. For state schools like Virginia and UNC, there could be political pressures to preserve athletics futures for their in-state brethren in Virginia Tech and NC State, along the lines of those that were at play in the early 2000s when the ACC was looking to expand, and then-Virginia Gov. Mark Warner leveraged the UVA vote to snag an invite for Tech.
Another direction this could go for the ACC could involve another effort to expand, by trying to get Notre Dame to become a football member, by looking to expand further from there by adding a 16th program, and additional programs, maybe poaching from the Big 12 or Pac-12, though it’s hard to figure who you’d want to try to poach from either, with all the big names (the aforementioned Texas, Oklahoma, USC and UCLA) having already been accounted for.
I don’t feel good at all at the end of this thought exercise. The ACC may very well indeed survive, but I don’t know how North Carolina and Duke don’t end up bolting for the Big Ten, how Clemson, Florida State and Miami, and maybe also Georgia Tech, don’t end up in the SEC, and how Virginia doesn’t end up getting left behind to anchor a mid-major ACC.
I’m hoping against hope that things don’t turn out this way, but it’s hard for me to see this not being where things are headed.
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Chris Graham
