ACC again considering SMU as expansion target, which should have already happened

The latest twist in the ongoing As the ACC Turns saga has conference leaders now wooing SMU to join the league.

The question with this news that has been all over the interwebs on Tuesday: what in the Sam Hill took ‘em so long?

I’ve only been writing about this since last July, when reports first emerged about possible interest between SMU and the ACC.

It was obvious right away that the two sides needed each other.

For SMU, its ambitions are much bigger than the AAC, and the Big 12, which already has a school in the Dallas/Fort Worth market, wasn’t going to come calling, and the Pac-12, which made a push for SMU last year, may have been a player, but the Pac-12 may not exist much longer after what’s happened the past few days, so, consider that one a bullet dodged.

For the ACC, SMU is a great fit academically, ranking 72nd in this year’s US News and World Report list (Virginia ranks 25th; Virginia Tech 62nd), has, if not more money than God, is at least in the same tax bracket (a $2 billion endowment), and SMU Athletics is competitive on the playing field.

And then there’s the location, in the Dallas/Fort Worth DMA, the nation’s fifth-largest, with a smidge over 3 million TV households.

The location, with the academics and athletics parts of the equation being what they are, is the key here.

The in-market rate charged by ESPN to cable carriers for the ACC Network isn’t something that’s public knowledge, but the number that’s been thrown around by industry analysts is $5 per month per subscriber, which, if that’s in the perimeter of reality, would mean adding the Dallas/Fort Worth DMA to the fold could bring an additional $180 million in annual revenue for the network.

We’d be talking, then, an additional $10 million to $11 million per ACC member school per year.

The San Francisco/Oakland/San Jose DMA, home to Stanford and Cal, two other potential ACC expansion targets, would bring another 2.6 million households into the ACCN in-market fold.

That could be another $9 million to $10 million per ACC member school per year.

Those two moves alone – SMU, and then Stanford/Cal – comes really close to making up the current gap between what the ACC pays out to its schools vis-à-vis what the SEC and Big Ten pay out to their schools.

Now, yes, the new SEC and Big Ten TV deals are going to increase the gap again, and the ACC, which is stuck in an ESPN-friendly deal through 2036, can’t do anything to address that anytime soon.

Adding SMU, Stanford and Cal keeps the ACC alive (yay!), moves the conference back into third, ahead of the Big 12, which in the past week passed us with its aggressive moves to add Colorado, Utah, Arizona and Arizona State, basically through the end of the decade.

Around 2029, 2030, we could be facing realignment pressure again, but these moves would kick the can down the road a few years, in an ever-evolving media landscape that may look nothing like what it does today.

So, there’s this, or continued inaction that pushes UVA, North Carolina and FSU to begin the breakup of the league.