It’s not just Clay Travis, it’s a lot of people who have been predicting for several years now that the ACC Network would likely flop. However, they’ve never provided any real insights in their prognostications.
In fact, what we’ve seen has been a dramatic moving of the goal posts from those people.
It started with, “They will never get their own network because that league is going to break apart.”
Next, it was, “Okay, that league may not break apart for the foreseeable future, but they’re never going to get a network like the
major conferences.”
Then, it was, “That network is never going to happen. What is taking so long? If it was really going to happen, we all would’ve heard something by now. My ‘sources’ are telling me that the project is dead but they don’t want to announce it yet.”
That was followed by, “Okay, it looks like the network
is going to happen after all, and they are going to stay together, but their network will never meet expectations or projections.“
All baseless speculation.
Just last week, Jon Wilner from the San Jose Mercury News – who covers these types of things – also cast serious doubt on the ACC’s ability to make anywhere near the money that is being projected as part of an extensive series he is writing on the PAC 12’s precarious television situation.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/02...-erase-the-revenue-gap-within-the-power-five/
However, all of those people are ignoring some very big and obvious tells.
# The first was Pitt choosing the ACC over the Big 12. Why would we choose the former over the latter if we thought that in the long run, it was going to make substantially less money for us?
# The second tell came whenever all those other teams were trying to get into the ACC.
# The next tell came when Florida State and Clemson – who were long rumored to be joining the Big 12 and who were definitely approached about it —each decided to stay and commit to a long-term GOR.
Again, why would they do that to make less money?
# And, all along, ESPN has been intimately involved. Why would they get involved with this project, much less spearhead it, if it wasn’t going to make them a lot of money?
Pooh-poohing this makes no sense whatsoever and honestly, it never has.
The ACC does not have the passionate following, living alumni or market share to ever catch the Big Ten or the SEC. That’s just reality. However, it does have the most densely populated region of the country within its footprint and it has tremendous strength in the two major sports and more than enough strength in the other sports to do quite well.
I think it is going to slide in as third in the “Power Five” payment structure for the long-haul – which is perfectly in line with where it slides in from a television ratings perspective.
The Big 12 is a lot more limited from a television reach perspective and it is well chronicled that Oklahoma and Texas do not get along. Those are not good things for the long-term prospects of that conference. Honestly, what they’ve managed to do even up to this point has been pretty remarkable.
The PAC-12 has a lot more harmony but the stone cold fact of the matter is that their time zone dictates that they play most of their games outside the glare of the national spotlight. I’m not sure what they can do to change that outside of playing more early games, which is great for people in Pittsburgh, New York and Chicago, but not as great for people in Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle.
Also, I think Larry Scott and their league presidents made some terrible decisions with regard to their conference network. I think jumping into the pool without having any idea how deep it was, was a catastrophically moronic decision.
Scott arrogantly assumed because he was able to get some distribution with the Women’s Tennis Association, that he could do the same with a college sports network without any real experience in that regard, or any actual infrastructure or any semblance of leverage.
To quote those famous Guinness commercials, “Brilliant!”
Honestly, I don’t love the ACC. I still miss a lot of things about the Big East. Also, I still feel like an outsider in that conference and I suspect we always will be a “northern team.” However, when you look at it in such kill-or-be-killed terms, which is really the only honest way to look at it in this era of such brazen corporate raidership, it’s difficult to argue that things could’ve worked out much better for Pitt.
