Six years after the ACC expanded to 14 teams and brought in Notre Dame as a partial member, the conference is finally getting its own sports network. The ACC Network officially launched at midnight on Friday, August 23, making the ACC the fourth major conference to have its own network.
15 schools. 1 home.
🚨 WE. ARE. LIVE! 🚨 #ACCNLaunch pic.twitter.com/MUEH00i7ws
— ACC Network (@accnetwork) August 22, 2019
The ACC Network will feature 40 games this season, with its first game airing on Thursday, Aug. 29. That game will feature defending the national champions, Clemson, hosting a totally revamped Georgia Tech team. All 14 programs and Notre Dame will have at least one game featured on the network.
While no one expects the ACC Network to be a ratings smash, the conference is hoping that it can be successful enough to close the revenue gap that has opened between these schools and some of their Power Five peers. The Big Ten Network and SEC Network have both created financial windfalls for schools in those two conferences, and the television money distributed to those two conferences from the networks is substantial.
According to the San Jose Mercury News, each Big Ten school is projected to receive $52.1 million in FY 2019. The SEC isn’t too far behind at $45.5 million per school, but none of the other Power Five conferences are expected to dish out more than $40 million to each member institution.
The ACC has been at the bottom of the food chain in terms of TV money, receiving just $27 million per school in FY 2018. While that’s orders of magnitude above what Group of Five conferences receive, it’s significantly less than what you see with other schools, leading to the ACC falling behind as a whole.
Unlike we saw in the past with the SEC Network and what we still see with the Pac 12 Network, most cable providers have added the ACC Network to their programming. Comcast, Dish Network, and Cox are the primary holdouts.
