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The power play that was the grant of rights solidified the conference, but what did Swofford do with this new-found clout? Absolutely nothing. The wake-up call ended there, since the ACC squandered the opportunity to pick off a few great schools and teams that would have added competitive balance to the conference where it was needed: football (See SEC and Texas A&M).

In hindsight, it looks like the only successful byproduct of conference realignment for the ACC was to secure another decade of the soft and pathetic leadership that is John Swofford and the NC brigade of athletic bureaucrats.

Sadly, no public outreach was made to schools in Texas or Oklahoma. The Aggies moved to the SEC and further enhanced their profile and funding, strengthening both the school’s posture and that of the SEC’s. The media analysts at the ACC made an enormous miscalculation, targeting the Northeast market - a strong NFL market, and decidedly NOT a college football market. The strategy was, effectively, to grow in a large media market where nobody consumes the product and add some great legacy basketball schools. This was not what the ACC needed.

Sadly, for the ACC, no leadership came from FSU or Clemson, no voices of reason clamoring to fire Swofford for what can only be described as sleeping at the switch. To make matters worse, both the Big 10 and the SEC moved quickly to secure conference networks worth tens of millions of dollars in annual payments to their member schools and restructured their TV deals to earn vastly more money each year. All while the ACC was left with an opportunity to get one years out and a big, one-time payment penalty if it the network were not created.

How could this happen? It is yet another example of a lack of vision and leadership – from a conference whose teams have done more than they should to carry their peers and the conference leadership. Like good Catholics have pictures of Jesus and the Pope by their bedsides, John Swofford should have Dabo and Jimbo gracing his nightstand for without them, he would be toast. Sadly, for Clemson and FSU – it is not their burden to carry the conference even though they have done so for two decades. The other schools need to get better. Miami is on the path, Louisville is making great progress, yet the conference is still viewed as weak, even when it beats the SEC.

This is largely because ESPN has a major bias toward its investment properties, the SEC and Big 10. And why not, if you were a travel agent, would you put a guest in your hotel or a competitors’?