I've seen a few posts suggesting that ESPN has to lighten up on enforcing their contractual rights and pay the ACC what it's worth or risk driving the value of the deal into the ground if the members can't compete with other conferences. I say start by releasing the tier 3 rights back to the schools to put them on par with the B12. That would cost ESPN nothing, but would go a long way towards addressing the concerns of FSU and others.

Thoughts?

Most of what is included in third tier rights remains with the schools now. Basically, each school would get 1 game to sell on their own. FSU makes about $6.5MM on their rights. NCState just signed a big deal last summer. ESPN needs to simply pay FMV, but Swofford keeps locking us into forever and a day.

every school keeps some of it's tier 3 rights, the only way to make real money off of them is to bundle them together & sell it to tv networks or place them on your own network. the pac 12 turned all of its rights over to conference & that's a hugh reason why they got the big $$.

Problem is it would not cost them"nothing ." The third tier rights were actually sold to ESPN who monetized them via syndication and espn3. It was thought that part fo the reason the rights went up (before sports rights exploded in general the year after you signed) was because ESPN received the full rights, as opposed to the Syndicated rights Raycom had. For them to give those up, would cost them money based on how they valued the deal. It woudl actually cost them a lot of money, as they make a good chunk of change between syndicating the games, and the ESPN3 subscritpiosn they have picked up due to the exclusive games. You must rememebr, ACC games are the most valuable property ESPN3 has in its exclusive inventory, followed second by SEC games (they don't have any "exclusive" ESPN3 games, but you can see out of market "SEC NEtwork" games).

Perhaps the ACC could use the $50M from Maryland to buy back tier 3 rights?

Unless they were just in a giving mood, those tier 3 rights are probably worth in excess of $30 million a year to ESPN