After accepting offers to join the Atlantic Coast Conference during the weekend, Syracuse University and the University of Pittsburgh will become the 13th and 14th members of a conference that just one year ago negotiated a TV contract worth nearly $2 billion.

Last July, ESPN and the ACC reached a 12-year agreement for exclusive rights to every conference-controlled football and men’s basketball game, plus Olympic sports matchups, women’s basketball and conference championships. The agreement is set to begin this season and run through 2022-23, and is worth $1.86 billion over 12 years, or $155 million per year.

Syracuse and Pittsburgh can’t begin play in the ACC until the 2014 season because of a 27-month notice required before leaving the Big East conference. The two longtime Big East members also have to pay a $5 million exit fee to the conference to make the move to the ACC.

The ACC is now able to reopen negotiations with ESPN, although the TV contract negotiated in July 2010 was more than twice the annual amount in the previous contract. For Syracuse and Pittsburgh, the ACC contract is more lucrative than the current Big East TV contract with ESPN, which runs through 2013. The Big East voted to turn down a new contract offer with ESPN in May, leading to criticism that Pittsburgh led efforts to decline the offer.

‘By expanding by two schools, contractually we do have the opportunity to reopen those discussions with our current rightsholder, which, of course, is ESPN,’ said ACC Commissioner John Swofford in a teleconference held Sunday. ‘It does not allow us to go to the street with an open bid, but it does allow us to reopen our negotiations with ESPN.’

In the ACC, equal revenue sharing is ‘sacred,’ Swofford said. At the end of each year, there’s a distribution of shares to members. The ACC recently raised its exit fee to around $20 million, Swofford said.

The Big East is under a six-year contract with ESPN worth a total of $200 million. The ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and Southeastern conferences all have deals worth at least $1.1 billion, according to a May 5 ESPN article.

In the Big East, the revenue from the TV contract goes into the conference’s general pool. Each member receives one dispersal from the Big East for football and another for basketball, said Chuck Sullivan, director of communications for the Big East. In terms of football, Sullivan said, TV money is put in the revenue pool along with money from bowl partners before being distributed to Big East members.

Some adjustments are made to the amounts to each member based on the number of national television appearances a school makes, the distance a school has to travel for a bowl game and the prominence of the bowl a school attends, Sullivan said.

‘It’s close to an equal disbursement, but it’s not exact,’ he said.

In the 2009-10 fiscal year — which runs from July 1, 2009, to June 30, 2010 — Syracuse received $3.3 million for football and $4.2 million for basketball, Sullivan said. The football team went 4-8 in head coach Doug Marrone’s first season, and the men’s basketball team won the Big East regular-season title before being bounced in the Sweet Sixteen by Butler.

Pittsburgh received $3.9 million for basketball and $4.8 million for football from the Big East in the 2009-10 fiscal year, Sullivan said. The Pittsburgh men’s basketball team made it to the second round of the NCAA Tournament that season, while the football team went 10-3 with a bowl win over North Carolina.

The 2009-10 fiscal year data is the most recent available.

The Big East voted to turn down a contract offer with ESPN in May, which would have paid up to $11 million per team, according to an article in The Boston Globe. Pittsburgh Chancellor Mark Nordenberg and Athletic Director Steve Pederson then received criticism claiming they had led efforts to decline the offer, a charge that Nordenberg denies.

‘In the end when the conference did decide not to accept the ESPN offer, it was an unanimous vote of all 16 members not led by us or by anyone else,’ Nordenberg said.

Sullivan said that the Big East can negotiate with ESPN at any time.

‘As a partner with ESPN, we’re free to negotiate with them right through November of 2012,’ he said. ‘And after that, if a deal isn’t reached with ESPN by then, we’re kind of on the market where we’d be able to negotiate with other interested parties.’

But the ACC, with its current contract of nearly $2 billion over 12 years, was still able to attract the likes of Syracuse and Pittsburgh, causing them to leave the Big East with its TV contract.

‘We didn’t make this move for one reason; we made this move for a lot of reasons,’ Pederson said in the teleconference. ‘But certainly there will be financial benefits that come along with that.’

jdharr04@syr.edu 

Published on September 20, 2011 at 12:00 pm

Contact Jon: jdharr04@syr.edu