![]() ![]() The league has softened its stance over the last decade but has continued to draw a line in the sand with no night games after Halloween. The Big Ten has a complicated relationship with night games, with schools like Michigan not even having permanent lights installed until well into the 21st century. Last month, issues began to publicly emerge with the Big Ten’s record-breaking TV contract. ESPN has almost single-handily been the driving factor in the explosion of college sports TV rights over the last 20 years but due to drops in revenue from cord-cutting that can’t be made up through streaming subscribers, it isn’t able to easily commit to opening up the checkbook to ensuring it will get more of Texas vs. The SEC won’t be going to 9 conference games next year due to ESPN not guaranteeing it will increase the conference’s payout. The issue is that even if there is a way out of the Grant of Rights (which as of now, there seems to be no indication of), financial pressures on the SEC and Big 10 to deliver on bigger TV viewership means those conferences and their network partners will be more selective. With the new model, Phillips acknowledged the ACC’s new reality but outside of getting ESPN to agree to some kind of new TV deal (the chances of which are essentially zero), there is little to stop schools from continuing to search for backup options. This model doesn’t touch any TV revenue, which negates the TV viewership metrics that Alford has publicly championed showing that FSU was amongst the most highly-viewed teams in college football. The band-aid-on-a-bullet solution the ACC voted on was an unequal revenue-sharing model based on athletic success, with an exact model and parameters still to be determined. The news of the “ Magnificent Seven” in the ACC sent shockwaves across the college football landscape just before the league’s annual meeting in Amelia Island earlier this year.įlorida State athletic director Michael Alford had been at the forefront of lambasting the ACC’s current media deal, but the day that ACC athletic directors and commissioner Jim Phillps were set to meet, it became public knowledge that Florida State, Clemson, Miami, UNC, NC State, Virginia, and Virginia Tech had explored all possible avenues to get out of the ACC’s Grant of Rights and into greener pastures. ![]()
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