One AD says ESPN will be the impetus to make it happen. Surprise...
The way the nine-game ACC football schedule issue keeps popping up every couple months, it's starting to seem like more and more of a reality. Especially with the latest bit of info from Georgia Tech, where GT athletic director Mike Bobinski seemed to imply that ESPN's influence and, of course, money, would make it happen.
The GTAA projects it will receive $22.2 million from the ACC in the 2015 fiscal year. (That’s $5.5 million more than was previously projected. The increase is due in part to the league signing its grant of rights, which was worth about $1.1 million per school from ESPN.) That is largely ESPN cash. That number would increase in the future if plans for an ACC network are realized.
"I don’t know that there will be ultimately a lot of decision making to go into that," Bobinski said, referring to the nine-game possibility. "I think it’ll be something that we’ll need to do to find a way to do as a league, and that’s a way to do it."
We know DOC Gross wants to see Syracuse play more of the major market schools more often and adding a conference game each season is certainly one way to make that happen.
Personally, I don't see the harm in it. Obviously it means we lose one non-conference game. Chances are, we'd still hold on to our FCS and MAC games, with the third one being either Notre Dame or a Big Ten school, something like that.
Right now, Syracuse only has one non-conference game scheduled in 2015, 2016 and 2017, so whenever this change happened, if it happened, it wouldn't cause any headaches for us. Unless, of course, it means we have to go back to Atlanta again before we have time to figure out how to play defense against GT.
