Powerful Forces Behind Potential ACC - Big East Merger - Kevin Stacom

Powerful Forces Behind Potential ACC - Big East Merger - Kevin Stacom

On a recent podcast, Hall of Fame former Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski put forth the idea of the ACC and the Big East forming a mega basketball conference, to which St John’s Hall of Fame coach Rick Pitino, prior to a successful road win at UConn (68-62), last Friday gave his full-throated endorsement.               

Coach K mentioned that although the ACC has been a great conference, it now needs to get better; that lately, their outcomes have been down “results-wise” in men’s basketball and football, and he’d like to consider some “innovative ideas” to try and counter the surging Big 10 and SEC conferences in particular. He said that he thinks they should at least begin to open up discussions of an ACC, Big East merger involving the formation of a super basketball conference.                   

Per Rick Pitino, “I am 100% in agreement with him. I’ve been trying to get the Big East on board, and obviously, I jumped on your bandwagon with the suggestion…and to get up to 18, 16 teams...eleven is just not enough. And right now, a little like the ACC, we are not the typical Big East of the past that was getting 8 or 9, 10 teams in the NCAA tournament. So I think we are missing the boat if we don’t expand.”                   

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It would probably not be wise to dismiss out of hand an idea proposed in earnest by someone like Coach K with all his experiences in the game, and by the likes of Coach Pitino who didn’t get where he is by thinking small. And it’s understandable that longtime coaches and people associated with college sports might feel that the ground beneath them is crumbling and it’s only natural to seek some sense of security in the scale of greater numbers. 

 

Devil in the Details                

But as longtime friend, Big East co-founder, and commissioner, former NCAA committee member, and conference consultant Mike Tranghese reminded me, the devil is in the details.           

First of all, the ACC has 18 member schools, all of which play football. The Big East has 11. Tranghese is doubtful that a 29-team league would ever make sense, and he, more than anyone knows the logistical horror of trying to weld the behemoth of football culture to its more nimble cousin, basketball.

Related to that issue, Tranghese reminds us that one of the main positives the Big East enjoys because of its relatively small size is the reinforcement of legitimate rivalries due to the round-robin format of scheduling whereby each team plays each team in the conference home and away each year. This is important also due to the fact (as another friend on the business side of college athletics informed me) that gate receipts are a bigger proportion of revenues in basketball conferences than they are in bigger football conferences, where TV revenues are the be-all and end-all.              

Tranghese was also quick to mention that the recent slight downturn in the ACC and Big East standings is probably due to the cyclical ebbs and flows of coaching changes, etc. - that since the year 2000, the Big East has had 15 final four appearances, the ACC 19, the Big Ten 17, and the SEC 12. His thought is to not forget in the last 25 years a Big East team has won the title 8 times           

On the other side of the ledger is that at the time of this article, of which the two aforementioned coaches are probably acutely aware, there are only 2 ACC teams ranked in the AP Top 25 (#2 Duke and # 23 Clemson) and only three ranked Big East teams (St John’s #9 - its highest ranking in 34 years, Marquette #18, and Creighton #24).        

Of the two conferences mentioned specifically by Coach K, the SEC and the Big 10, currently, the SEC has 9 schools positioned in the top 25, including four of the top 5, and the Big Ten has five ranging somewhere between #7 and #25.           

Is this just cyclical in nature, or did these big football schools enjoy a built-in institutional advantage at the dawn of the NIL age, given their immense budgets and experience in treating college athletics as a veritable professional enterprise?

       

A quick look at the respective conferences and their most recent TV/media deals:

 

Big East:            

New 6-year deal with Fox, NBC, and TNT sports about $80 million/year, commencing 2025-2026 (an improvement from about $41 million/year last 12-year deal)

 

SEC:

$300 million/year for 16 team league

 

Big 10:

$7 billion/year for 7 years

To put it in a bit of perspective in terms of scale, a mid-level Big 10 school like Northwestern receives $60 million/year per its media share, compared to what the entire Big East conference gets as its media revenue, $58 million (estimate not counting NCAA share)

It should be mentioned at this point that football also brings huge overhead, so these numbers can be very deceiving; as reported in a previous article on NIL, Ohio State had gross revenues of about $279 million for all of its athletics and expenses of about $274 million - approximately only a little more than 2% profit on gross; not acceptable in the private sector. 

To further complicate matters, the ACC seems to be in the midst of a fairly bitter protracted legal battle between 2 of their more high-profile football schools, Florida State and Clemson. It’s basically about how to share the pie equitably when these two programs feel they contribute more proportionally than they receive. They think at this 11th hour, they’ve worked out a solution based on what they’re identifying as “brand” and “success” initiatives that will reward them for their greater than their peers’ contributions. They will receive a bigger share based on the calculations of these new metrics, thereby keeping those key programs in the ACC and also benefiting the less successful schools by keeping them with the benefits of being a member of a power conference. 

How would you insert whatever version of the Big East into that football maelstrom? I know it’s tempting to think about cherry-picking the best of the Big East schools with, as Coach K says, the tradition and quality of both conferences and the attractive “footprint” they would establish to draw a lucrative TV deal, but at this point how that would be accomplished with, again, both the ACC and the Big East just having consummated long term media rights deals, would be anyone’s guess. 

The hanging chad that lingers quietly behind the scenes is the issue of UConn’s long-term solution of finding a permanent landing spot for its football program. In addition, Besides the football and athletics issues is the fact that, as someone close to the school for many years and tuned into the inklings of the Board of Trustees, administrators, etc, UConn might at some point seek more of an institutional fit that matches its exponential growth as a university replete with the growth of its medical school, dental school, scientific research centers, and satellite campuses bringing its student population to about 35,000. UConn’s recent flirtation with the Big 12 was for a reason.

It was clever of Coach K to throw the carrot out to UConn, specifically during his podcast, where he initially presented his idea of a Big East/ACC merger.

All the Conference realignments taking place with all the huge dollars at stake are creating an atmosphere of high-stakes musical chairs where nobody wants to be left standing when the music stops.

Meanwhile, back to the real world, I’m looking forward to watching my never-say-die Friars compete against Xavier tonight at the AMP!