RALEIGH, N.C. — When Oklahoma and Texas announced their intention to jump to the SEC last summer, it felt like distant thunder on the horizon in ACC country. Concerning, maybe even menacing, but not imminently threatening.
But when the Big Ten poached UCLA and Southern Cal from the Pac-12 last week, the call was coming from inside the house. Not only because it made a final mockery of the eminently mockable Alliance between the ACC and Big Ten and Pac-12, but because if the Big 12 had been ripe to fall, the Pac-12 and ACC were supposed to be equally secure.
Now all bets are off. The ACC as we know it is under deep existential threat from not only the Big Ten and SEC, but from its partner in its namesake network. In a world where Fox and ESPN, the unseen forces driving conference realignment at any cost, have already picked the two winners of how this is all going to turn out, the ACC isn’t one of them.
The question isn’t so much whether the ACC can be saved. It’s whether, for those schools that may have options, it’s even worth saving at this point.
A tragedy for the ACC and college sports
That the latter is even a consideration is a tragedy not only for the ACC and its fans but college athletics at large. This entire enterprise was once built on the idea of like-minded, geographically congruent institutions competing against their peers. In many ways, it’s what made college sports great in the first place, whether it was the Ivy League or the Sedgefield Seven deciding they were a better fit together than in the Southern Conference, and how right they were for almost 70 years.
But the networks don’t care about any of that, nor do the college presidents who allegedly oversee this mess and have chased the dollars even if it means cross-country flights for cross-country runners. There’s not even a vague academic pretext to this, just hoarding of assets. As the Big Ten and SEC continue to consolidate their power, it’s hard to conceive any way the ACC can keep up. It’s already $25 million per school per year behind, and that gap is likely only going to grow.
Notre Dame, long the ACC’s Great Golden Domed Hope, would be foolish to join as a full member now when the Big Ten can offer tens of millions more. The ACC missed its chance with the Irish during the pandemic, potentially a fatal error. Some sort of Alliance Part Deux with the Pac-12 sounds vaguely promising but doesn’t actually offer that much without UCLA and USC and Notre Dame football.
ACC commissioner Jim Phillips didn’t create this mess, other than putting his misplaced faith in his Alliance peers – they looked each other in the eye and he ended up with egg on his face – but he’s going to need a miracle to fix it. He’s going to need a miracle just to hold the ACC together as it is; the grant of rights that ties schools to the ACC through 2036 loses strength with each passing year, if it will even hold up in court.
Can the grant of rights hold up?
On paper, the grant of rights is imposing, prohibiting schools from selling their own television rights as long as it’s in effect. In the hands of the right lawyers, or buried under enough money, it may only be paper-thin. No one really knows. If the few ACC schools with options are really smart, they weren’t teleconferencing with their lawyers last week to look for loopholes; they will have had that question asked and answered already.
North Carolina is certainly one of them, the one ACC school that’s unquestionably attractive to the Big Ten with its national brand and public-school academic prestige. If both sides are smart, that’s only a matter of timing and logistics now – and who else goes along for the ride.
Duke’s basketball pedigree is probably worth something to Fox – those two games a year alone may be worth it – but like the Bizarro Seinfeld friends, the Big Ten already has a Duke. If the North Carolina General Assembly was really on top of things, it would have acted as news broke on the final day of the legislative session to yoke N.C. State to UNC in perpetuity, taking a lesson from the way Virginia politicians shoehorned Virginia Tech into the ACC. There may still be time in January.
On the plus side, if UNC departs the ACC the state would be off the hook for $15 million, because the handout for a new ACC office was predicated on a conference with four charter members in NC – in which case the South Atlantic Conference should definitely move across the border from Rock Hill and send the legislature an invoice.
It’s not personal. It’s strictly business.
Clemson, Florida State and Miami are all attractive to the SEC in different ways, never mind the irony of how Miami’s failure to remain nationally relevant in football helped put the ACC in this weakened position in the first place. And if Notre Dame’s off to the Big Ten as well, the ACC could potentially become a nine-team conference with Virginia and Wake Forest and Duke or N.C. State stuck with a bunch of Big East leftovers.
What’s left of the ACC will have become what it once swore to destroy.
This all isn’t inevitable at this point. It just feels that way. And love of and loyalty to the ACC aside, finding a way out of the grant of rights and into one of the two power conferences left standing would be the smart move for UNC and Notre Dame and Clemson and the others. It’s not personal. It’s strictly business.
You can’t put a price on decades of tradition, and therein lies the problem.
