Massive Move in ACC Meetings Makes SEC Meetings Must-Watch Now

Tell us which 'ACC 7' schools you want commissioner Greg Sankey to land

Author:
Kent Smith
Publish date:
May 16, 2023 1:02 PM EDT

In this story:

FRISCO, Texas – What was once a get your popcorn ready meeting agenda down in Florida for the SEC may have just turned into a full on tailgate after news of what's gone on in the ACC meetings emerged yesterday.

What was once expected to be a somewhat spirited debate about how to finalize the SEC pod system for 2024 will now almost certainly include gathering thoughts about where various schools stand on picking off a massive chunk of the ACC. According to Outkick.com's Trey Wallace with an assist from Brett McMurphy, a group of schools being referred to as the "ACC 7" are more or less staging a hostile takeover of the conference's lack of discussion in regard to its grant of rights deal.

It's been no secret that Clemson and Florida State have been banging the drum hard to either get more money for their television rights or they will do all they can to find a new conference, which most likely would be the SEC. What wasn't as widely known was that those two schools had assembled a team of five more schools to develop a plan to work together to break the ACC's grant of rights deal one way or another, including research into a nuclear option where all seven leave the conference at once in hopes it would dissolve all obligations.

We now know who those additional schools are. In addition to Clemson and Florida State, Miami, North Carolina, North Carolina State, Virginia and Virginia Tech have had lawyers working for months with an eye toward the ACC meetings in Amelia Island. The result of that 4-hour meeting was a tense conversation between athletics directors and conference officials that ended with ACC commissioner Jim Phillips commanding athletics directors to not speak with the media.

That makes the discussions that have been had ad nauseam about which schools to potentially add to the SEC much more real. So many talking points have been immediately generated as to which programs get snatched up by the Big Ten and which find their way to the SEC. A mass departure would immediately create a ripple effect across college football. If the SEC were to take on an odd number of schools from the ACC, then logic determines that the conference will turn westward to even things out. The most likely target would be Oklahoma State, which would ease a few political tensions in Oklahoma, but would throw a little bit of a wrench in the Big 12's plans to become its own super conference by adding Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah.

The one subtext that should be obvious is that each of these schools have an exit plan. To make such a bold move without assurances of a landing spot once they depart would be one of the greatest blunders in all of college sports. For instance, if every school except NC State had hand shake deals with the SEC, Big Ten or the Big 12, the Wolfpack could suddenly find themselves as a fill-in for Cincinnati in the AAC for far less money than schools are complaining about in the ACC.

The one thing that's for certain is that the SEC will be ready to pounce when necessary if it's in the conference's best interest. The rest of college football has always been six steps behind the SEC when it comes to thinking forward and acting just before anyone else would see the need to act.

So since these schools are rather neatly grouped, we'll leave it up to the readers to share their voices as to how they would like this to shake out. We've put together various combinations and spread them across two Twitter polls for SEC fans to vote. There are obviously a large number of combinations, but creating more would simply get too messy.