I spent two days at the SEC and ACC Media Days last week. The one thing that sort of caught my eye the most about the ACC one is the lack of interest/following amongst the opposing schools. Other than the Clemson "media aka fans with a blog" there just wasn't a lot of interest in what other schools had to say and this even extended to myself at the ACC Kickoff. I helped out our Miami site with some interviews with their players and Mario Cristobal, but that was as far as my interest went. I even forgot Mike Elko's name despite the fact I broke the biggest story on his career prior to getting hired at Duke when he left Wake for Notre Dame at the time.
People just don't care as much, good or bad about their fellow ACC teams. There isn't even a lot of Twitter drama like you see in the SEC where guys are subtweeting comments coaches or players made at SEC Media Days.
I think this is where overexpansion is killing the ACC a little bit. Other than Pat Narduzzi there wasn't really a coach I was interested in listening to nor many characters and my interest in Narduzzi was simply to see how petty he would be talking about the B1G (he delivered).
I get that Duke football sucks and no one cares, but Miami fans care, GT fans care, UNC and UVA have fans who care. But it is not the same and that is where the money piece comes into this. Other than FSU and Clemson the fans just are not as bought in on football. It is an issue across the board in the conference and probably why externally they are hurting with financials compared to giant schools like the B1G has or the SEC schools that are mostly in areas except for Vanderbilt with zero pro sports and mostly in college towns or even small cities built around the college town. Again the ACC has some of that, but you also have Cuse, Pitt, Louisville, GT, Miami, etc... who are not that way.
So that is the negative rant.
The positive one is people are trying to figure things out and make them work if they can. Everyone is stuck right now in a bad TV deal, but the reality is if everyone was suddenly a TV free agent the leagues would all look very different including the ACC, SEC and B1G.
Several people at the ACC KIckoff I talked to expect the ACC to make some type of move. There is tremendous internal pressure from programs to do so otherwise people are going to peel off as soon as they can in five or seven years when the GOR money because more palatable. Does that happen? I would like to think so.
I think ESPN is a big company and putting all their eggs in the SEC basket and devaluing all the other leagues they have deals with is not in their best interest especially when those deals come back up. What happens if ESPN continues to lose money via cord cutting and Disney clamps down on the spending and they get outbid when the SEC deal comes up again or someone makes a power play to build a third conference?
Those are hopefully the points the ACC leadership are harping on and again inventory is important. Having Arkansas-Vandy is not the same as having a NFL game with the Titans and Cowboys, so you can't bank four TV networks on shitball games that no one outside of a subset of a region will care about.
One other interesting thing to watch is Miami. They may actually have a pulse with Mario now for the first time since they joined the ACC. He was always the guy I thought GT should be concerned about getting that job and he finally did. The good news for GT is they fall down to one of the 5-5 teams and are no longer a permanent opponent after next season. D-Rad for those who dislike him on here, gets stuff done with the resources he has in football and he showed that by hiring CPJ and then helping build around Dabo at Clemson. I'd keep an eye on the Canes because if they can get their crap turned around it helps the league out in a major way. The ACC needs some of the deadweights they've added to start becoming relevant again.
On the GT side of it, I thought Zamari Walton, Dylan Leonard and Dontae Smith did a top-notch job at the ACC Kickoff. I thought Geoff Collins was the more reserved Collins we saw in spring ball and really no one was going to poke him in Charlotte anyway.
I'm very curious about camp and the upcoming season. GT fall camp is scheduled to start on August 5th right now, but that date has been moving around for the last few weeks, but that was the last one I was told. We don't have a media schedule yet for that, but I'll update the board when we do probably the start of the week of camp is my guess based on history on that.
My plan is to have a WAR ROOM next Friday as well. Stay tuned for that.
Thanks for your patronage,
KQ
