ACC presidents were originally scheduled to meet on a call Monday evening to discuss and potentially take action on expanding its conference to add the likes of Cal, Stanford and SMU, according to Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger. That phone call has since been moved to Tuesday evening after the University of North Carolina had an active shooter on its Chapel Hill campus.
SMU is willing to join the ACC for free, or at least close to it. The proposal, according to Dellenger, is that SMU would forgo at least seven years without any revenue distribution, and as many as nine. However, after that, SMU would collect TV revenue from the conference at a rate that would gradually increase over time.
This is similar to what The Athletic senior writer Nicole Auerbach reported last week. According to Auerbach, SMU would take no media rights revenue from the ACC for a period of time (7-9 years) and Stanford and Cal would come in at a partial share. The latter two schools have agreed to start at 30% of distribution, or about $8 million each, according to Dellenger. Because ESPN would still be paying a full share for each additional member, there would be a pool of newly available money.
So, it’s not permanent. SMU would see revenue shares after those 7-9 years, as the grant-of-rights runs through 2036, a binding agreement in which they’re required to sign to get ACC membership. Dellenger also reports that all three schools (Stanford, Cal and SMU) would receive non-TV distribution annually from the ACC, which includes evenly distributed monies from the College Football Playoff and NCAA Tournament, among other things.
As Yahoo Sports columnist Dan Wetzel penned in his column on Monday “SMU’s Hail Mary to play big-time football again,” he wrote that “SMU is willing to get no money because its monied alums are willing to cover the loss. Money is, literally, not an issue.”
So, with money not being an issue, SMU can technically make its way into the conference for free, while its boosters pick up the tab to cover any losses. It doesn’t seem like the savviest move from a monetary standpoint, but money is not an issue or of object here, this is about a school desperately trying to make its way into a Power Five conference.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.