TV is where the money is: UVA shouldn’t settle for demotion to ACC Network

My first thought when I saw the news that the UVA-UNC football game on Oct. 25 is a nooner on the ACC Network was, Carla Williams needs to start working the phones.

Remember that the ACC announced in the summer that it’s going to dole out 60 percent of its TV money going forward based on TV viewership, with 75 percent of that piece of the pie based on football TV numbers.

---

ICYMI

• The new ACC TV money deal is going to hit UVA Football where it hurts

---

Well, guess what: viewer numbers for ACC Network are so bad that ESPN doesn’t pay Nielsen to measure viewership.

Let that one sink in for a sec.

If you wondered why ACCN has so many Gorilla Glue and Ellipse commercial spots during the three-minute TV timeouts, yeah.

Not saying here that the ACC folks don’t know the numbers, of course, because they do – just that, they’re so bad that they don’t want us to know.

Bad news for us UVA fans there: UVA Football has been on ACCN three times already, through six games – for Coastal Carolina, William & Mary and Stanford.

You can pretty much write those numbers off as probably being sub-100K.

---

Our three non-ACCN games have been:

• Week 2: @NC State (659K)
• Week 5: FSU (4.39M)
• Week 6: @Louisville (687K)

---

This weekend’s game with Washington State is on The CW, which is averaging 631,000 viewers this season, with that number skewed by the surprising 1.13 million average for the Sept. 6 Baylor-SMU game.

The UVA-UNC game – pitting a UVA team with a shot at playing its way into the ACC Championship Game and a UNC team trying to work its way through the Bill Belichick shenanigans – is probably our best shot at a game that a good number of people might want to tune into.

The UVA-Duke game in Durham on Nov. 15 could be for that ACC title game spot, but it’s football UVA-Duke, not basketball UVA-Duke.

UVA at Cal on Nov. 1 screams ACCN, and Wake at UVA on Nov. 8 feels like The CW.

If the Virginia Tech at UVA game on Nov. 29 is for a spot in Charlotte for the ‘Hoos, maybe it gets ABC or main ESPN treatment, but otherwise, it’s ESPN2, The CW or ACCN.

We’re halfway to what may be the best season in UVA Football history, and we may end up losing money in the long run.

The ACC is still booking UVA like we’re the 14th-place team the media said we’d be back in the summer.

This is where ADs make their millions.