The good news for the ACC: the conference was able to distribute $45 million to each of its 14 full-time member schools in the 2023-2024 academic sports year, a record for the conference.
The bad news: well, where do we start?
First, the 2023-2024 fiscal year was pre-expansion, with three more mouths to feed coming into the fold in the 2024-2025 sports year, in the form of SMU, Cal and Stanford.
The pool of ESPN TV money is still pretty shallow relative to the SEC (which paid out $53 million per school in 2023-2024) and the Big Ten (still waiting for 2023-2024 numbers; in 2022-2023, the B1G distributed, gulp, $62.9 million per school).
We get a little more from the expansion, but don’t be surprised to see the average drop when the 2024-2025 numbers come out this time next year.
What this means for the ACC – OK, like I care about the whole of the ACC; my focus is, what it means for UVA Athletics – the 2023-2024 year is about as good as it’s going to get for the foreseeable.
When you consider that 2023-2024 was prelude to what we saw this past year – ACC Basketball got just four teams into the NCAA Tournament, and though we did get two teams into the CFP, they were both one-and-done – yeah.
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Chris Graham
