ACC’s Expanded Football Schedule Is Primarily About TV Inventory

On paper, the ACC’s eight-game conference schedule was the best approach when it came to competing for College Football Playoff spots. Limiting the number of challenging games minimizes losses for top programs, and maximizes the number of teams – and potential revenue – for the league when it comes to the postseason.

College football isn’t played on paper, though. And you could argue that today’s landscape is primarily dictated by meetings within ESPN and Fox.

As the sport’s two primary rights holders continue to dictate narratives, conference affiliations and push soaring revenues, it’s only natural that they’d get final say in what the TV inventory looks like.

And so they have, in the case of both the SEC and ACC’s recent decisions to expand their conference schedules to nine games.

ACC’s Competitive Advantage Today

The ACC’s decision came on Monday, along with a mandate for each team to play 10 games per year against power conference teams, aligns it with the Big Ten, Big 12 and (recently) SEC’s own scheduling arrangements.

It all makes sense from a perceived “fairness” standpoint. And the ACC won’t have much trouble hitting the number between its Notre Dame arrangement (five games per year) and existing ACC/SEC rivalry games.

Where the problem arises is around how creating extra hurdles might impact the conference when it comes to securing College Football Playoff spots relative to its peers.

Unlike the Big Ten and SEC, in particular, top ACC teams don’t have a ton of opportunities to collect name-brand pelts during conference play. That makes avoiding losses (and thus, accumulating wins) their biggest advantage to-date.

Last year, the league secured two College Football Playoff spots with Clemson and SMU, partly because of limited challenges on their schedules. Clemson played three ranked teams before the Playoff (went 1-2, with the one win being against SMU in the ACC Championship Game). SMU went 2-1 vs. ranked teams, beating Louisville and Pittsburgh before losing to Clemson – but neither Louisville nor Pitt were ranked at the end of the year.

ESPN’s Push For More

Dynamics like that, common for ACC teams over the years, have been great for the league. But perhaps less so for its TV footprint. And specifically, the impact of ESPN’s ACC inventory across platforms (including the ACC Network).

While it’s great for ESPN and the league to have some highly-ranked teams they can spotlight week-to-week, it’s less advantageous to have a couple dominant teams just stomp out lesser teams both in- and out-of-conference.

Currently, most ACC teams schedule another power conference team on top of their existing eight games, with some – notably Clemson and Georgia Tech in recent years – adding more.

But for most, it’s still leaving three lesser games on the schedule, which are harder sells for ESPN to drive both tune-in and advertiser interest. iSpot data around second-by-second measurement shows ad reach in the latter half of blowout games can decline by nearly 50% versus peaks during the same game; making large swaths of that ad inventory far less valuable.

By adding another conference game, that’s theoretically an extra eight or nine games of “competitive” inventory between programs casual fans recognize. That could mean more losses for teams across the ACC. But it also means better games on ESPN networks and streaming, which is how the SEC arrived at the same decision.

What The Future Holds For The ACC

More losses for ACC teams could conceivably harm the conference’s College Football Playoff aspirations, depending on the form the event takes in the coming years.

Previous proposals from the SEC and Big Ten have different methods of splitting up fields of 12, 14 and 16 teams. The SEC and ACC going to nine conference games apiece removes some advantages for both in a scenario where the only guarantees were conference champions.

For the ACC, moving to nine conference games may make it more likely to favor a structure where the top two teams from the conference automatically make the field. The real concession there is that the ACC and Big 12 accept “second-tier” status versus the Big Ten and SEC, which would both get more automatic bids.

That could be the cost of keeping the conference afloat in the short-term, since it maximizes the avenues for football-focused members like Clemson and Florida State (who previously sued the league) to compete for national titles.

Yet the possibility exists, too, that Clemson and Florida State fail to make the College Football Playoff in a scenario where the ACC is guaranteed two spots, and then uses those exclusions as reason for leaving later this decade.

But what other choice does the conference have right now?

If ESPN – which owns the playoff – and the SEC have elected to move to nine games for the sake of TV inventory, then the ACC pretty much has to do the same or risk losing its status as a “power conference.” If its teams can win, or at least play for, a national title or two over the next five years, then perhaps the panic about its future is put on hold.

But if it can’t, then this push to nine games potentially dooms it to future defections as the league’s vaunted media deal nears expiration (and teams can leave with far fewer penalties starting next decade). Maybe that happens either way. We’ll never find out, though, with the ACC now squarely relying on the idea of better TV inventory to secure its future.