ACC Network to feature league’s women’s basketball, baseball tournaments after new deal
One of the ACC’s stranger television anomalies was corrected last week when ESPN reached a deal with Raycom to acquire the rights to games in the ACC women’s basketball and baseball tournaments that had been carried on regional sports networks — what used to be Fox Sports South and is now Bally — instead of the ACC’s own network.
Since the launch of the ACC Network in 2019, those missing games, the vestigial tail of the ACC’s legacy television deal — signed with ESPN and Raycom in 2010 — had been a source of considerable consternation among women’s basketball and baseball coaches, who quite rightly wondered what the point of having their own network was if they couldn’t find their most important games on it.
“It was just odd, you know?” N.C. State coach Elliott Avent told The News & Observer. “You push the ACC Network and the game of the week. That’s a big exposure piece. And then you get to the conference tournament and none of the games were on. It was just shocking that the ACC Network wasn’t going to carry the ACC (baseball) tournament or the women’s basketball tournament. It just seemed kind of odd. You had to explain it to recruits and they’d say, ‘Coach I want to watch your game but I can’t find it.’ ”
It became an actual, tangible, competitive problem during the baseball tournament in Charlotte, Avent said, when coaches and players would want to watch the other games only to find the host hotels didn’t carry the right channel.
When Jim Phillips went on a listening tour of the league after taking over as commissioner in 2021, this specific issue came up over and over again. Unfortunately, because it was essentially a rights issue between ESPN and Raycom, it was technically outside of his power to solve it — not that it wasn’t a constant topic of conversation between Phillips and the league’s partners at ESPN and Raycom CEO Hunter Nickell.
“We can’t not have ACC baseball show up in Miami during ACC tournament time,” Phillips told The N&O.
Untangling the leftover threads of that deal with Raycom has proven to be one of the trickier tasks in Phillips’ early tenure — and the legacy costs of that deal, including the costly buyback of rights from Raycom to launch the ACC Network, will eventually come off the books in 2027 — at which point each ACC school will get an immediate bump of about $3 million more per year from the ACC.
“It’s a one-sided deal. I can’t yell at them,” Phillips said. “They signed the deal. They got the deal. Congratulations. You got a great deal. Just like ESPN. You got a great deal. Congratulations.”
No longer a broadcaster and syndicator of ACC (and other college) games to over-the-air stations as it was for decades, Raycom is primarily a behind-the-scenes production services company now, with clients that include ESPN and the ACC Network. When the ACC re-upped with ESPN in 2016 with the intent to launch the ACC Network, Raycom was cut out of the picture as a broadcaster. The 2019 ACC tournament ended 37 years of television history in the ACC footprint.
Most of the rights and inventory Raycom held prior to the creation of the ACC Network were bought back by ESPN during the 2016 negotiations that led to the creation of the network — but not all of them. Raycom still held some rights granted during the ACC’s television negotiations in 2010, when then-commissioner John Swofford famously told ESPN executive John Skipper that he would only go all-in with ESPN for the first time if that network made Raycom a part of the package.
That included the ACC’s digital rights, sold to Raycom in 2010 and then subsequently renegotiated when the ACC later realized the increased value of its highlights and footage with the explosion of social media. That was originally designed to relieve the ACC of the effort of running its own website; it has since become a partnership trying to squeeze money out of those digital rights.
Other rights still held by Raycom included a package of one football game and two men’s basketball games a week as well as the women’s basketball and baseball tournament games. Raycom had resold those to Fox and other RSNs in a deal so profitable that it proved prohibitively expensive for ESPN to reacquire the rights in 2016.
The additional football and basketball inventory doesn’t offer enough additional value to justify the cost to reacquire it. But the tournament games caused so much friction that Phillips successfully pushed ESPN to find a way to get them under the ACC Network umbrella.
“When we asked about it two years ago, nobody could understand it,” Avent said. “It became such a big issue at the coaches’ meeting. They said nothing could be done. I asked how many years, and they couldn’t even tell me that. That told me it was a lot of years — four, five, six years. Then I got the email from the commissioner. I was shocked as much as thrilled. I was told it couldn’t be done.”
Never miss a Luke DeCock column. Sign up at tinyurl.com/lukeslatest to have them delivered directly to your email inbox as soon as they post.
This story was originally published August 22, 2022 at 6:10 AM with the headline "ACC Network to feature league’s women’s basketball, baseball tournaments after new deal."
