If the ACC falls apart, Virginia politicians may have to help pick up the pieces

That sound you heard was the second set of football cleats falling.

Clemson has now joined Florida State in suing the Atlantic Coast Conference to get out of what the ACC once called an “ironclad” contract dealing with all-important television rights.

If they succeed, the ACC as we know it is done for. The ACC as we know it may already be done for. After all, this is a conference that last year voted to add schools in Texas and California, schools that are nowhere close to the Atlantic Coast. 

The old Chinese curse says beware of living in interesting times. We’re living in some now. We’re watching a tectonic realignment of college sports conferences. Last year, the Pac-12 dramatically imploded and is now left with just two schools, both in unglamorous media markets that nobody else wants. I am not inclined toward apocalyptic scenarios, but there are plenty of sports commentators out there prophesying that the ACC could meet the same fate. 

That’s why all this matters not just to fans of Virginia’s two ACC schools — Virginia Tech and the University of Virginia — but also to Virginia politicians, who might find themselves entangled with some of the details of an ACC collapse.

Let’s not mince words here: Big-time college sports is a business. There’s too much money at stake for it to be anything else. And it’s that money — primarily television revenue for broadcasting rights — that’s changing everything. Once there were multiple regional conferences that were more or less evenly matched. Now TV money is splitting Division I-level sports into two groups — the haves and, well, I hesitate to call them the have-nots, but certainly the have-less.

In the ancient days of 2000, teams in the Atlantic Coast Conference actually received more TV money than anyone else — about $8.1 million per school, according to research by AL.com and USA Today. However, the Big Ten and Southeastern Conference schools weren’t that far behind, with Big Ten schools making $7.2 million and SEC schools $6.6 million.

Now, ESPN reports that Big Ten schools are expected to pocket $80 million to $100 million from the league’s most recent TV deal. The SEC schools average $51.3 million.

And the ACC? About $39.4 million, according to ESPN.

That doesn’t include the recent College Football Playoff deal, which ESPN reports “will codify the further financial separation of the expanded Big Ten and SEC from everyone else in college athletics.” Big Ten and SEC schools will get $21 million, ACC schools about $13 million, with Big 12 schools getting about $12 million and schools in the so-called “Group of 5” a mere $1.8 million.

You can blame the TV networks, if you want, but this is simply the free market in action. Fans would rather watch Alabama than Virginia Tech, no matter how good the Hokies might be in a particular year. It’s the same reason Hollywood studios cast big-name stars rather than lesser-known actors. 

This is what really rankles Clemson and Florida State, because they think they should be at the same level as those Big Ten and SEC schools. Those are not unreasonable expectations by those schools, either. Both schools have fielded national championship football teams, Clemson most recently in 2018, Florida State in 2013. The chances of repeating those feats becomes more difficult, though, as the money gap between schools widens.

Here’s why money matters so much. That whole bit about “student-athletes”? Nice, quaint little notion. We’re now in an era where a lot of those players are getting paid — the whole “name, image and likeness” endorsement thing. You can argue about whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing but it doesn’t really matter: It’s a thing. It’s happening.  

When my alma mater, James Madison University, lost its football coach to Indiana earlier this year, there was lots of chatter on JMU fan sites about what the future of the program would look like. The question, though, wasn’t whether the successor would be a good recruiter or play-caller but rather on how much money boosters had available to pay for certain positions. The going price of a wide receiver at that level was put at $150,000. There’s no more pretense anymore: When colleges operate a Division I sports program, they’re really operating an entertainment division and workers quite naturally expect to get paid.

That’s part of what drove Alabama’s legendary coach Nick Saban into retirement: “Maybe 70 or 80% of the players you talk to, all they want to know is two things: What assurances do I have that I’m going to play because they’re thinking about transferring, and how much are you going to pay me,” Saban told ESPN.

Those are reasonable questions for any prospective employee to ask a potential employer, and that’s how Division I college sports seems to work now. Just as the big-market Los Angeles Dodgers have more money to offer baseball players than the small-market Kansas City Royals, those big-market Big Ten and SEC schools are going to have more money to offer players than the mid-market ACC schools. No wonder Clemson and Florida State want out. If they aspire to compete on the same level as Alabama, they need to be making Alabama-level money — and they’re not going to be making it in the ACC.

Whether those schools have an option, that’s a bigger question. From a market perspective, the SEC may not have an interest in either school — the SEC already has the University of South Carolina and the University of Florida. If the SEC is going to add schools, and divide the payouts, it ought to be adding schools that bring more market value — and increase everyone’s payouts. Clemson and Florida State may or may not do that. There’s an argument for the SEC to add those schools as a defensive measure to keep the Big Ten out of the South, but neither Clemson nor Florida State matches one key Big Ten criteria: Membership in the Association of American Universities, a group of the nation’s top research universities. That’s been the academic fig leaf that the Big Ten clings to. Still, if you’re Clemson or Florida State, it might make sense to gamble on free agency, because those schools know the current setup is dooming them to second-class football status that they can’t abide.

If those schools find a way out, then other ACC schools might follow, either by choice or by circumstance. If the Big Ten wants to move into the SEC’s Southern territory, it doesn’t need either Clemson or Florida State. It could take Georgia Tech or Miami; both ACC schools are AAU members and would bring big media markets. The most talked-about ACC school has been North Carolina, said to be coveted by both the Big Ten and the SCC because it would bring a new market to both. 

Florida State has never struck some ACC purists as a “real” ACC school. Clemson, though, is one of the ACC’s original schools, and North Carolina is smack in the middle of Tobacco Road, which once defined the league. If North Carolina left the ACC, the ACC as we know it really is gone.

The University of Virginia has also been cited as a potential candidate for both the Big Ten and the SEC for the same reason North Carolina is: It would bring a new market into either conference.

That’s where all this starts to have political implications. In North Carolina, both UNC and North Carolina State answer to the same governing board. Gov. Roy Cooper has already made it plain he doesn’t think the two schools should be in separate conferences. “I would hope that would not happen and that would not be good for our state,” he told Raleigh’s WRAL-TV earlier this year. Does that mean either the Big Ten or SCC would have to take both schools as a package deal?

What about Virginia? Last year, when conference realignment chatter was in the air, Attorney General Jason Miyares pointedly warned in an interview with Cardinal that neither Virginia nor Virginia Tech should do anything that hurts the other. For practical purposes, that was a warning to Virginia, which may have more options than Tech does. (Virginia is an AAU member so would qualify for the Big Ten; Virginia Tech is not.) In 2003, then-Gov. Mark Warner got involved in helping Tech get into the ACC. It’s not out of the realm of possibility to think that Gov. Glenn Youngkin might need to get involved in helping Virginia Tech find a new conference home if the ACC flew apart. (If the governor could get the Alexandria arena approved, he could even pitch that as the site for a basketball tournament as an inducement.) Why should the governor or other politicians get involved in college sports? Because we’re not talking who the starting left guard should be, but a major business that operates in the state. There are economic development impacts if realignment leaves Virginia Tech with a less desirable set of opponents. A study in 2015 by the Virginia Tech Office of Economic Development calculated the economic impact of Hokies football at $61.9 million per year. In today’s money, that’s $82.19 million.

Whatever happens, it seems likely that something will happen here, but we’re mostly talking about what the ACC needs to do to survive. That’s why the ACC last year abruptly added Southern Methodist University and two schools on the West Coast, California and Stanford. The ACC’s TV contract requires at least 15 members. There was already talk last year of three schools leaving, so in adding three new schools, however geographically awkward they are, the ACC essentially bought itself an insurance policy. If more schools left, the ACC would need more replacements — and the sports world is full of speculation as to who those schools might be. The schools most often mentioned: Connecticut, Tulane, San Diego State, South Florida and those two Pac-12 orphans, Oregon State and Washington State. Marketwise, some of those are more intriguing than others, but none of those would put the ACC on par with the Big Ten or SEC. As for that economic development impact I mentioned above, here’s your thought experiment: Which will draw more fans to Blacksburg — a home date against Florida State or South Florida? For sports fans, the question answers itself.

In the past session of the General Assembly, Del. Terry Austin, R-Botetourt County, introduced a bill that he said would make it easier for college athletes to receive name, image and likeness funding. He warned that without it, Virginia schools would simply become training grounds for bigger conferences — and that star players would simply transfer to the Big Ten or SEC for more money and more opportunities. That bill is now pending before the governor, but the danger is that a two-tiered system is already here. Clemson and Florida State sure think it is.