Why is the SEC beating the ACC in basketball? Because of SEC football money

SEC 9, ACC 1. That’s the tally on the big scoreboard in the sky after Night 1 of the 2024 SEC/ACC Challenge, which the SEC has already won, with six games, including UVA-Florida, on the schedule for Night 2.

Seven of the nine wins on Tuesday were by double-digits, with four by 20 points or more.

I thought it would be a couple more years, at least, before the SEC would be this much better than the ACC in basketball, our sport.

The ACC’s success in the postseason the past couple of years, and the SEC’s relative lack thereof, masked just how much further ahead the big boy football money was already causing us an issue.

It’s plainly obvious now.

And here’s the bad news – no, the SEC eating our lunch in basketball isn’t the bad news.

The money gap that is fueling this is only going to get worse.

The ACC is stuck in a TV deal that isn’t going to get any better between now and 2036, while the SEC and Big Ten are on their second deals since the one that former commish John Swofford and the league presidents signed with ESPN back in 2016.

That 2016 ACC TV deal seemed smart at the time, because the grants of rights by the member schools would prevent the conference from being poached well into the future.

That part is working out, but at the cost of having everybody tied to a deal based on a 2016 media-rights reality.

The market for TV college sports has grown exponentially since 2016, and the SEC and Big Ten, by signing shorter-term deals, gave themselves the ability to play the market to their advantage.

Which is why they’re already generating tens of millions of dollars more per school than the ACC is, and the gap is going to grow over the lifetime of their most recent deals, and, more bad news, they get to go back to the pay window at least one more time before we do in 2036.

The lawsuits filed by Clemson and Florida State aimed at trying to wriggle their individual ways out from the grants of media rights aren’t going to amount to anything in terms of addressing the issue at hand.

To be clear, I quit law school to go into journalism, but the only way out that I see is if a majority of the league’s members, which comes to 10, since we have 18 now for all sports other than football, votes to break up the ACC.

As obvious as it would seem that it shouldn’t be hard to get at least 10 to want to do that, the drawbacks are just as obvious – namely, it might not be what we can get, but the money we’re getting now is set in stone, and we have no idea what would happen if we all go out on the open market at once.

This is the source of the inertia, and it’s only going to get worse before it gets better, if it ever gets better.