Now that we are into the college football offseason, news is going to shift from what happens on the field to what happens in courtrooms and corporate boardrooms across the nation as the annual realignment drama fires back up. This week, one such development was made public when it was announced that ESPN exercised its option to continue broadcasting ACC sports through 2036. And one reported nugget in that story could have a huge impact on Clemson and Florida State, two schools that have sued the ACC as a challenge to the league's grant of rights agreement with ESPN.
According to David Hale and Andrea Adelson's article on ESPN, the ACC is considering the adoption of an unequal revenue-sharing model among its universities. That would likely go a long way toward assuaging the concerns that Clemson and Florida State have about how much their annual payouts from the conference are.
While the league is also trying to find ways to create more marquee football matchups to generate more television revenue, there have been "...discussions between the ACC and Clemson and Florida State on a new revenue distribution model aimed at alleviating the schools' biggest concerns over financial disparities with peers in the Big Ten and SEC, both of which have more generous TV contracts signed over the past two years.
"Under the proposed plan a percentage of the ACC's television revenue would be included in a 'brand' fund, and that money would then be distributed to schools that annually generate the most revenue for the conference in football and men's and women's basketball -- with Clemson, Florida State, Miami and North Carolina likely at the top of the pyramid, sources told ESPN."
Should this idea become a reality, the ACC would be playing a dangerous game. After all, we've seen this model attempted by another major conference and it had rather disastrous results.
Some 15 years ago, the Big 12 decided to unequally distribute its revenue to member institutions and that led to terrible infighting and a lack of cohesion among its schools. Ultimately, many think that that decision, which included allowing Texas to have its own television network in partnership with ESPN, was a huge reason schools such as Texas A&M, Nebraska, Colorado, and Missouri eventually found greener pastures with other conferences.
What's more, that even the unequal payments were not enough to keep blue-blood football schools Texas and Oklahoma in the Big 12 for the long haul as the disparity between what they could make in the SEC vs. staying in the Big 12 was simply too great to pass up.
Could the same fate be waiting for the ACC if the conference heads down that path? It is hard to know.
That's because the landscape of college athletics is vastly different now than it was in 2010. For instance, there is one less power conference for teams to turn to as a landing spot with the PAC-12 now being nothing more than a struggling mid-major conference.
Therefore, teams that are unhappy with getting less annual money from the ACC than Clemson or Florida State might have to just swallow that painful pill knowing that they are simply fortunate that the conference remains intact giving them a seat at the big kids' table.
Of course, Clemson and Florida State would have plenty of options should they decide to leave the conference after 2036. What's more, by then, who knows if the traditional conference model will even be in place?
Hale and Adleson also report that the conference would expect Clemson and Florida State to drop their lawsuits against the ACC if an unequal revenue model were to be implemented. Of course, that would make sense for both universities because their concerns about not being able to keep pace with SEC and Big Ten schools would be lessened.
So while the news from corporate America about television contracts and revenue sharing is not as exciting as other developments in the world of college athletics, it might be just as important as anything else that happens. And the latest word is that Clemson might be in for a nice financial windfall since the ACC and its primary media partner have a mutual interest in keeping the Tigers in the conference for the duration of the ESPN deal.