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ACC expansion is protection against any future defections

Andy Staples head shotby:Andy Staples•09/01/23•

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ACC exapansion

The creation of the Coastal Elite Conference makes zero sense. ACC presidents voted Friday morning to add Cal, Stanford and SMU to create an 18-school — 17 for football — Frankenstein’s monster of a league that stretches from Boston to Miami on one coast and then hops to the Bay Area with layovers in Louisville and Dallas. From a practical standpoint, it is now easily the most ridiculous conference.

The creation of the Coastal Elite Conference makes 7.2 billion cents. That’s how much ESPN will have to pay the ACC each year after the addition of those three schools. Cal, Stanford and SMU don’t get to split that $72 million equally, though. Cal and Stanford came at a significant discount, and SMU basically said “You can keep it all for the first nine years.” Essentially, SMU’s donors have said they’re willing to float the difference as long as it gets the Mustangs back in the club they were bounced from when the Southwest Conference folded.

Just as Dallas is now the layover between Tobacco Road or Tallahassee and the Bay Area, the creation of the Coastal Elite Conference is merely a way station between this and the next version of college football. The most recent moves in realignment has telegraphed the eventual formation of something that looks like college football’s version of soccer’s English Premier League, but none have done it so nakedly as this one.

Why? Because of the real reason the ACC added three schools.

The ACC has a clause in its deal with ESPN that states if the league drops below 15 members, ESPN can reopen negotiations for a contract that runs until June 30, 2036. Clemson, Florida State and North Carolina voted against the additions. Clemson, Florida State and North Carolina have been quietly — or in Florida State’s case, not so quietly — working for the past two years to find a way out of the ACC. Other ACC members have publicly held firm that the grant of rights all 15 schools agreed to in the previous decade locks them all together until 2036, but with Florida State in open rebellion and Clemson and North Carolina working behind the scenes, maybe they aren’t so sure. So on Friday, Boston College, Syracuse, Duke and the like ensured their paychecks won’t go down if Clemson, Florida State and North Carolina escape.

That leads to one conclusion: Clemson, Florida State and North Carolina are going to escape. The remaining ACC schools are merely protecting their income levels until this contract expires. But to where would the unhappy trio escape? The Big Ten or SEC are the preferred options.

On the surface, it seems the SEC would be less likely to add beyond its current 16. The ACC’s move just cost ESPN another $72 million annually for two schools (Cal and Stanford) it didn’t want to pay for after this school year and one school (SMU) that it already had at a much cheaper rate in the American Athletic Conference. Beginning in 2024, ESPN will own all of the SEC’s broadcast rights. Between rights fee payments and a revenue-sharing agreement for the SEC Network, ESPN will be paying the SEC a fortune. But ESPN bucked at paying more when the SEC was discussing adding a ninth conference game. If ESPN doesn’t want to pay more for more Tennessee-Oklahoma, LSU-Georgia or Auburn-Texas, it probably doesn’t want to add $35 million or more annual bumps to what it pays for each of Clemson, Florida State and North Carolina should the SEC decide it wants them.

So why would the SEC even consider adding more? Because it might not want the Big Ten encroaching on its footprint, and because it definitely doesn’t want the Big Ten to be able to claim a superior football product. Even after the additions of Oregon and Washington for 2024, the 16-team SEC remains a better football product than the 18-team Big Ten. But add Clemson and Florida State to the Big Ten, and suddenly that gap narrows more. Plus, the Big Ten would have a foothold in the South. The SEC has been content to stay regional. The Big Ten clearly desires to be a national endeavor. It can only do that by acquiring valuable brands in the SEC’s region. Clemson and Florida State qualify. So even if the SEC doesn’t want or need to add them, would it consider those additions solely to keep them out of the Big Ten? North Carolina, meanwhile, is a school both leagues covet because they’d like to expand their footprints into a rapidly growing state.

The ACC taking Cal, Stanford and SMU feels like an admission that it can’t ultimately stop its best brands from leaving. Unless the Big Ten has decided it doesn’t actually want to be a nationwide conference — which seems odd since it just added a West Coast wing — then Clemson, Florida State and North Carolina finding their freedom will create more consolidation at the top because the same market forces that led Oklahoma and Texas to the SEC and USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington to the Big Ten will cause one of the two to welcome the trio that wants out of the ACC.

Or maybe it doesn’t matter what the leagues want. Maybe, instead of pushing their conferences to cut the less appealing brands during a future round of media rights negotiations, the top earners simply break off and form their own collective. That’s what 20 English soccer clubs did. What would stop 40 or 50 schools from doing the same? The most recent round of TV negotiations has proven two things:

  • Companies will pay nearly anything for premium rights.
  • If you don’t have a premium product, today’s price is lower than yesterday’s price. (The Pac-12 learned this the hard way.)

We don’t yet know how a college football Premier League would look. It was telling in Jan 2019 when SEC commissioner Greg Sankey recommended a particular book.

 The Club: How the English Premier League Became the Wildest, Richest, Most Disruptive Force in Sports chronicles the creation of the EPL out of the regional, mom-and-pop world that was English soccer before the 1990s, but the parallels between that sport and college football are far too obvious to ignore. Clearly, Sankey and others in charge of the sport have understood this was coming.

Whether it’s the Big Ten and SEC continuing to operate separately as the AFL and NFL once did or whether eventually the top brands break off and form their own league — as the English soccer clubs did — remains to be seen. But when the Atlantic Coast Conference moved Friday to add schools only miles from the Pacific, it sent the most clear signal yet that the schools that might not make the cut are going to try to squeeze out as much as they can for as long as they can.