(04-14-2017 09:13 AM)CharmCityTiger Wrote: UNC and NCSU would be independents. No conference would be immediately interested in either considering the ACC owns their tv rights for the next 20 years.
If you read the text of the proposed bill, they wouldn't be forced to leave the ACC until after the GoR.
And even then, there's nothing stopping them from doing the exact same thing that the C7/BIG EAST did. They could coordinate w/ the ACC and ACC partners by leaving it, forming their own conference, buying the ACC name, invite the 14 other ACC schools to join them w/ an entry fee that was exactly the cost of the name buy and all the credits, etc. left behind, sign another GoR for however long they wanted (i.e. 20 years), officially unofficially adopt the history of the old ACC, have the conference vote to enact a new boycott, and begin the process anew.
That series of steps would keep UNC and NCSU in the ACC in perpetuity while maintaining absolute compliance w/ the proposed bill as it was written.
UNC and NCSU could also leave the ACC and be independents, but pool media rights, bowl rights, have a scheduling alliance that matches the ACC schedule exactly, and ask (and almost certainly get) a waiver that would allow the ACC to invite independents, like NCSU and UNC to participate in conference post season tourneys.
That series of steps would keep UNC and NCSU in the ACC in perpetuity while maintaining absolute compliance w/ the proposed bill as it was written.
And both of those could be tweaked countless times to make them slightly different, thereby making it impossible for the NC legislature to write a bill that would hold people in contempt if NCSU/UNC failed to leave the ACC. The only way that the legislature could force either school out of the conference is to credibly threaten to annihilate state funding of the school if the school played games about not leaving the ACC, and I'm not sure that there are the votes for that kind of threat.
Other than that threat by the legislature, the only way that NCSU/UNC would leave is if either they wanted to leave (not going to happen), or if the ACC kicked either of them out (not going to happen).
Therefore, the law, as written, is completely toothless. Both schools would have stayed in the ACC for as long as they wanted, regardless of what the ACC did or didn't do.
The above said, I still maintain that is was really dumb for the ACC to stray away from it's core mission and get involved in a social/political issue in NC.