Clemson filed suit against the ACC on Tuesday, seeking to greatly lower the cost to leave the league. There’s a bit more to it than that, but that’s the gist of it. CBS Sports had a pretty good writeup of the situation.
I am not a lawyer and can’t comment on the chances of the suit succeeding. It may only exist to be the first salvo in an exit negotiation that will take the form of a settlement agreement for the lawsuit. Quite a few see FSU’s suit against the ACC as such, so Clemson is now taking a similar tack in a less outwardly angry way.
It certainly looks now like the ACC is dead in the water as anything close to a power conference. The CBS Sports article I linked to notes that on top of FSU and Clemson, “Miami, North Carolina, Virginia, Virginia Tech and NC State have also met with legal teams to examine” the league’s grant of media rights. The GoR as written runs out in 2036, so getting out of it this decade will require either pulling a legal rabbit out of a hat or an obscene amount of money.
I’m old enough to remember when the general idea was that eventually we’d get to four 16-team superconferences. This was back 20+ years ago when those gaming out their ideas were reacting to the ACC swiping Big East schools. The concept of superconferences goes back to at least 1959, but that’s where I picked up the thread.
To hear some tell it in 2004, we were going from six power conferences down to five. We did slowly but eventually, as the Big East held onto its BCS automatic qualifier spot until it lost more schools and became the AAC. There was still one power conference too many, so the question became who would dissolve next.
The answer was very nearly the Big 12, when ESPN’s agreement to create the Longhorn Network in 2010 was the only thing to keep Texas from joining five other schools to create the Pac-16. The Big 12 never fully recovered from the episode, as the SEC would swipe Texas A&M and Missouri soon after. It muddled along until UT finally did jump ship along with Oklahoma, which prompted expansion to find safety in numbers. The league at least still exists in its state of diminished prestige, while the Pac-12 soon will not.
In that sense, our selves from two decades ago did get our answer for which of the five power conferences would collapse. Ironically the Pac-12 was often seen as one of the safer leagues thanks to its relative geographic isolation. Only the Big 12 seemed in striking distance, but the Pac-12’s reputation as an academic consortium really seemed like it should insulate it from raids. What university would flee being colleagues with Cal and Stanford to join up with Kansas State and Baylor? Turns out none, and the conference still fell apart anyway.
The four 16-team superconference idea went on life support when Texas and OU left the Big 12, as it meant only four conferences were left that could get there. What remained of the Big 12 lacked the prospects to achieve the “super” in superconference in anything but sheer numbers.
However, the Pac-12 still had the problem of not having anyone to go get who met the league’s academic standards. We might have four superconferences, but that league was going to be down a few members compared to the rest. The symmetrical 16-team league idea probably died when the Big Ten went and got USC and UCLA, and it well and truly died when the Big Ten went to 18 teams by adding Oregon and Washington.
It’s only a matter of time until FSU and Clemson leave the ACC. In hindsight, the only way the league could’ve kept them longer than they’ll end up doing would’ve been by agreeing to an unequal revenue share years ago. Even so, the gap is getting huge. At this point, the conference would have to give those schools — and probably at least UNC as well — nine million per year above the rest of the members just to make up for the ACC’s payout deficit versus the SEC and Big Ten in the upcoming 14-team playoff. They’d then need to give them even more to address the regular season gap.
This raises a question for the Wake Forests and Boston Colleges of the ACC. Would you rather have a drastically reduced payout but be in a power-conference ACC with FSU, Clemson, and UNC, or would you rather have a drastically reduced payout in a second-tier ACC without them and maintain some modicum of pride? It’s probably all academic, as some kind of unequal arrangement would probably end up a stopgap at best. The top two conferences will keep pulling away financially, so they’ll eventually end up with whoever they want.
I’d bet the ACC will remain a going concern. I just don’t think there are enough schools that the SEC and/or Big Ten would want to take that if they raided the league, it’d lose enough members to have to dissolve. FSU, Clemson, UNC, and maybe Miami are worth it. People keep throwing Virginia around like it is, but I don’t know. The conference could lose those four, backfill from the AAC again, and probably hold it together indefinitely like the Big 12 did.
But make no mistake, we’re too far down the road of the SEC and Big Ten becoming the new AFC and NFC to turn back now. Those marquee schools will leave the ACC, and one of the big two will take them. And before you start asking questions like why the SEC would need Clemson when it has South Carolina, consider that the right question might be why the SEC needs South Carolina if it has Clemson.
The old order of college football is teetering, with true superconferences on the horizon and amateurism rules being picked off one-by-one by court cases. When these ACC schools leave for greener pastures, that’ll be what pushes things irrevocably over the edge.