cpf2001
Helluva Engineer
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But nobody expected that to last, it was a period of crazy rights battles and everyone assumed the next time the SEC or Big 10 renewed they’d leapfrog the ACC. The SEC and Big 10 were able to poach from the Big 12 and ACC for a reason then.Read that again: 10 years ago, the Pac-10 and the ACC were getting paid the most from their TV contracts.
The story nationally about the ACC in 2012 wasn’t that it was on the rise. Clemson was showing flashes but also Clemsoning. FSU, Miami, and VT were shadows of theirselves from a decade earlier. (FSU hadn’t had their Winston title.) The ACC is in trouble because of how those three 90s-power-programs have struggled to consistently play at a high level for 20 years, we were already halfway there at that point and it wasn’t seen as just a blip.
The Big 10 wouldn’t have made GT an overnight contender but the worry is that by being shortsighted then we’ve created existential risk of not being in ANY major league once the ACC blows up. And the ACC blowing up eventually was seen as a possibility even then. The schools aren’t as big, the recent results weren’t as good, and the money race was intensifying. It wasn’t complex math.