As College Football creeps closer and closer to the age of mega conferences, a lot of College Football analysts, fans, and probably even some ACC Athletic Directors want to see teams like Clemson, Miami, and Florida State move to the SEC. However, there are a lot of monetary and legal issues that make that easier said than done, and one of the play-by-play voices for the ACC Network, Wes Durham, laid out those issues live from ACC Media Days on Dukes and Bell Thursday.
Most people understand the first step which is to pay $120 million dollars to the ACC Conference to cover breaking the grant rights deal/exit fee the ACC and other conference teams sign that allow conferences to evenly distribute television revenue amongst all conference teams, but again that is only the first step.
Wes then explains to Carl and Mike what other consequences would come with leaving the ACC right now saying “Florida State [Florida State was just used as an example] would surrender their media rights, if they went [to the SEC] tomorrow, they’d surrender the rights of that money for the next fourteen years. When they do that they would then go to another league, so lets say they went to the SouthEastern Conference, let's say Florida State and another team went to the SouthEastern Conference, in order for Florida State to make any money from media, the SEC would have to cut their pie two more slices, and pay eighteen slices as opposed to sixteen.”
Basically what Wes is saying there is if Georgia and the rest of the SEC teams are good and happy with their new television Deal, and are making l$90 million dollars, but then Florida State and another ACC team comes along, now Georgia and the rest of the SouthEastern Conference teams have to pay somewhere between $12 and $15 million dollars to offset the losses of Florida State and the other former ACC team because they decided to leave the ACC. Again, those numbers are hypothetically and just an example, but the point is how many teams are going to want to give back money just to add another team in? Probably not too many.
While it is fun to imagine teams in other leagues and conferences, the logistics don’t work like that. television contracts have to become finalized in other leagues, the College Football playoff has to get it’s new television deal and television partners set, and most importantly the ACC’s television deal has to expire just like how the Pac-12’s television deal is expiring which is allowing USC and UCLA to leave for the Big Ten in years to come. Wes predicts that it’ll be six years before we see anymore College Football teams moving conferences saying “I think six years is probably the ballpark number before we see another landscape shift.”
With NIL coming about, Texas and Oklahoma going to the SEC, and USC and UCLA going to the Big 10 it seems like change is happening so fast in College Football, and it is, but the timing for USC and UCLA was perfect for them to leave, Texas and Oklahoma still have a couple of years to go before they even join the SEC just like USC and UCLA have a few years before they join the Big 10, and NIL was long overdue. The dust has to settle a little in the Wild Wild West of College Football before the next whirlwind comes.