Modern day college athletics is more about money than it has ever been about before. Conference expansion, television deals and network creation are all about the eyeballs and money that can be added to the conference coffers.
The SEC and Big Ten lead the revenue side of big-time college athletics, and the ACC wasn’t supposed to be that far behind. It reworked a television deal with ESPN to pull them in close to the SECs and Big Tens of the world. There were promises of an ACC Network as well.
Since then though, ACC programs haven’t exactly reaped the benefits of said increases in revenue streams. Partly because the ACC Network is still in the works and appears to be on hold, but also because the cost of doing business has risen to levels few of these programs can afford.
It has all led to a major crisis in conference athletic department bottom lines. According to a Washington Post article, all but two of the ACC’s full-member institutions are in the negative despite major increases in revenue streams.
To be fair to the ACC, it isn’t the only conference with problems, with schools like Auburn, Maryland and Rutgers running big deficits and all but two Pac-12 schools in the red as well. However, the ACC is special in that almost every member of the conference is seeing their athletic budgets dripped in red ink, including two programs that were in the black just a decade ago.
New facilities, increasing coaches salaries, increasing athletic department staffing and increasing maintenance costs are partly to blame according to the Washington Post article. However, the article also demonstrates that this is a long-term problem for most athletic departments in the ACC, with all but two members back in 2004 in the red and all of them operating in the red in 2014.
No doubt that to be amongst the big boys the ACC has had to significantly invest in upgrades, but the conference has also done a good job of recognizing the need for more revenue.
The newest deal with ESPN saw a 30 percent increase in total revenue to the conference in ’13-14 alone, per Sports Business Daily. Each school as a result is seeing $20 million, which is nowhere near the amounts earned by the SEC and Big Ten, but is in line with competing given its footprint and football prestige.
However, the creation of an ACC Network and the additional revenue that may come with it has hit stumbling blocks thanks to financial numbers not working out just right and other hurdles to clear, according to the Associated Press a few months ago.
Competing on the field is one thing, and the ACC is doing that in both football and basketball like it has never done before. What it has failed to do is keep up in the financial arms race. Until the new network deal is done and the checks start rolling in, most in the ACC are going to be digging out of a major hole.
All of that will likely come at the expense of so-called “Olympic s[Sports,” sports like swimming and diving, wrestling, track and field, etc.
Has it gotten that bad across the ACC? Perhaps, and until the financial situation is fixed the conference is in danger of being less and less relevant as time goes on.
