Remember we said this back in May how the ACC Network is the wildcard conference’s future.
When considering the ACC’s future, you must always take into account the role the ACC Network may play. If you aren’t, then you are assessing the situation with a massive gap in understanding what factors may play a role in the conference’s future.
Well a recent story from the Athletic and about the ACC Lookin by Brendan Marks makes this statement more true than ever. It is behind a paywall, so I’ll paraphrase a couple of the highlights.
The ACC has not 1 but 2 media rights deals with ESPN. One for the base deal which has the lookin in 2027, and one for the ACC Network which runs until 2036.
It’s the expectation of industry experts the base deal will be picked up.
Guess what the ACC Network is binding the ACC to ESPN and vice versa even more so than we previously thought, and we were one of the first to recognize it would be a pivotal part of any discussion concerning the media rights deals.
Intellectual Property Lawyer @mckenzielaw (David McKenzie) had this to say about the new revelations.
I am not here to debate the legal merits of the lawsuits. Additional accounts to McKenzie’s like @RohanLawPC , @WinterSportsLaw, and @HMardenborough provide plenty of legal perspectives, but McKenzie’s take is intriguing. Many realignment observers spent an entire summer with a gigantic misunderstanding of the totality of the media rights deal. There’s now a new layer to the discussion that hasn’t been brought up until now.
It’s no surprise though… the nature of realignment news is almost always misinformation first, then the real details emerge.
