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The problem could be ESPN doesn’t have the money to make it profitable for the ACC. Travel cost would be a lot higher and some of the other sport could use that money up and it wouldn’t be profitable the ACC or PAC 12-10-9 schools.
Travel costs difference is negligible. A flight is a flight for the most part. Everything else is the same.
As @forensicbuzz said the issue is not in the travel, it's in the financial ability of ESPN, who is bleeding cash and laying off employees, to increase the agreement in such a manner that current teams don't lose money just to gain new members.
For instance, currently ESPN pays ACC teams $40 million a year (rounded to make this exercise easy) which means they are paying $560 million a year to the ACC. (Leaving out the partial payment to ND to again make the math easy)
If we were to add 4 teams, we would need to have ESPN increase the payout by $160 million just to stay static. We would need ESPN to raise the payoff to $900 million a year to increase payouts to $50 million per school, which would put us on par with where the SEC currently is and $10 million less than the B1G schools are getting.
To sum up, ESPN would have to increase the payout by $40 million per school added to stay static, which would already be a significant outlay for them in their current situation, or almost double their outlay to get us in the current payout ballpark. Being that ESPN is struggling financially, this seriously impedes our ability to add new teams at the moment.
Finally, all this is not to say I don't believe we will be adding teams. I think it's quite possible we could work out a deal with Apple and ESPN where we utilize Apple TV to cover home games involving the west coast teams and maybe even some content not picked up by ESPN to make adding teams worthwhile. My prediction, should we go this routhe, is we still will not eclipse $50 million per school bu might be able to bump it to $45 million per school.