Everybody knew back in 2010 that Miami, FSU, and Clemson were all due to be back. VT had carried the league for nearly a decade with only a couple of elite teams along the way. Anyhow, the common sense thing to do was to sign a short term deal and wait it out for FSU or Clemson or Miami (or all of them) to obtain elite status. Football makes up 80% of the TV rights contracts.

Since then, the ACC has been forced to add more and more teams in order to renegotiate that poor contract. It's been horrible and to make matters worse, the ACC's extended that poor deal out even further. The correct move was to negotiate a 5 yr contract with the ACC. Then in 2014, the ACC would have been negotiating from a position of strength.

And we still will not have a network. Regrettably, that should have been a primary concern back in 2009 and 2010. The B1G was already making major coin from a network. Worst case, the ACC should have left the door open to creating one down the road. Instead, we ended up with some ludicrous situation in which ESPN was forced to sell off many potential network games to Raycom. And then Raycom sold some of those off. This has made forming a network even less worth ESPN's time.