Forecasting anything five years from now is foolhardy, especially so in college athletics. Four years and 51 weeks ago, the entire world shut down and took March Madness with it, a traumatic turn that was widely predicted would force a new era of fiscal restraint in athletic departments. Since then, media-rights deals and salaries have continued to skyrocket, with conferences torn asunder for fun and profit—and even the athletes are now drinking from the money firehose. Restraint is for suckers, then and now.
So picturing what the Atlantic Coast Conference, or any other league, will look like five years hence is guesswork. But it sure seems like the ACC simultaneously kept itself together and signaled its 2030 breakup date Tuesday.
The league and its two internal saboteurs, the Florida State Seminoles and Clemson Tigers, agreed to stop suing each other. That was good for the ACC and its other 16 members.
They also have agreed to uneven revenue distribution tied to competitive success (a while ago) and also tied to TV ratings (that part is new). And they set a diminishing exit fee for leaving the league, from $165 million in 2026 to a relative bargain escape rate of $75 million in ’30–31.
That roughly coincides with what everyone in the industry presumes will be the next big spasm of change, with media-rights deals at or near expiration in other conferences and with the College Football Playoff. So instead of keeping it prohibitively expensive to leave the ACC before its ESPN contract runs out in 2036, the league has set a departure countdown clock at a reduced rate.
Will five years of presumed stability be worth the reduced equality? To be determined. The ACC at least followed the mantra of all embattled leagues—do not become the Pac-12—but it might also have set a precedent that further destabilizes the entire landscape.
Uneven revenue distribution is a concept that the likes of Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State, Texas, Alabama and Georgia could get behind, to the alarm of their SEC and Big Ten compatriots. If the schools that win and draw ratings are rewarded for it in the ACC, the idea is sure to come up elsewhere. The rank-and-file schools like Mississippi State and Minnesota had better clutch onto their equal conference revenue shares—heck, their conference membership—while they can.
This has been the trend for a while in college sports, where the term noblesse oblige has never been an easy fit and now seems downright quaint. The French concept from a few centuries ago suggests that those in advantageous positions are obligated to be generous with those of lower status. To share the wealth, as it were, or at least not to crassly flaunt their privilege.
In modern college athletics, where big conferences crush smaller conferences and aspire to hog championship access, noblesse oblige has been on its death bed for years. The ACC might have smothered it with a pillow Tuesday.
The league codified a means whereby its rich will get richer and the less-rich (nobody in the league is poor) will have to deal with it. There will be a financial reward for simply having a baked-in status in the form of a TV audience.
If your school has high ratings, it will get more money than those with lower ratings. It doesn’t matter whether your football and basketball teams are good just that a lot of people tune in to watch them.
So congratulations to the Seminoles, who stunk on ice last season but did have 4.99 million people tune in to watch them flop in their Week Zero season opener against the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets. They followed that up with 4.44 million who tuned in to see them get pummeled by the Boston College Eagles on Labor Day night. Per Sports Media Watch, the only conference game that drew a higher rating was for the ACC championship, when Clemson and SMU were watched by 5.98 million. (Nielsen Ratings don’t include the ACC Network, among others, or streaming services.)
Never has going 2–10 been so financially rewarding.
Florida State is historically successful. But its record over the last eight seasons is 51–47 and 30–34 in the ACC. Nielsen Ratings are the only consistently elite thing about that program since 2016.
The Miami Hurricanes, who played in six of the top 10 highest-rated conference games in 2024, are 50–37 over the past seven seasons, 32–25 in ACC games. The Canes haven’t won the league—or even a division—during that time. But they’re positioned for a greater payday if the TV ratings remain high.
Financially rewarding schools for winning is fine—that’s earning it on the field and the court. Paying schools for having an established following is the embodiment of allowing TV to call the shots and to separate league members monetarily from one another. It’s a divisive plan that isn’t based on winning and losing.
In another appeasement move, the ACC has agreed to schedule its top teams more frequently in the annual matchups with the Notre Dame Fighting Irish. The current plan is an annual Notre Dame–Clemson game, with Florida State and Miami rotating. That leaves three other ACC–Notre Dame games parceled out for the other 14 league members. Thus the league has created a self-fulfilling prophecy, boosting the ratings of the Tigers, Seminoles and Hurricanes more than the others by giving them more games against the high-profile Fighting Irish.
Ratings-based financial incentives will also lead to greater scrutiny of which programs are granted viewer-friendly TV windows. Friday night games did well last season—Miami–Virginia Tech drew 3.26 million viewers, for instance—so who gets those opportunities? The ACC also has some splashy traditional programming windows across Labor Day weekend that now could carry monetary advantages.
One of the tension points in the Big 12 more than a decade ago was the Texas Longhorns’ ownership of their tier-three media rights, which essentially was the ESPN-run Longhorn Network. That was enough of an irritant to help spur the departures of the Nebraska Cornhuskers to the Big Ten and the Texas A&M Aggies to the SEC—and in the end it still wasn’t enough to keep the Longhorns in the fold. Regardless of location, league-sponsored TV favoritism is never good for unity.
In the end, this might have been an arrangement commissioner Jim Phillips and the rest of his ACC constituents had to make just to buy them five more years and stop the lawsuits. But Florida State and Clemson were also rewarded for mutiny, with an accelerated doomsday clock for the league perhaps now starting its countdown.
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