Some of you may have heard of a man named Jim Crockett, Jr., who ran events in the Mid-Atlantic states of North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia during the 1970s and 80s.

While the cities of Charlotte, Columbia, Fayetteville, Greensboro, Greenville, Norfolk, Raleigh, Richmond, Roanoke, Spartanburg and Winston-Salem were ACC basketball strongholds, there was another very popular weekly event in those cities (both on TV or at the local arena).

It was known as Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling, a regional territory that was a part of the National Wrestling Alliance.

This post isn't about wrestling being fake, choreographed, etc.; it's about a very similar business in the ACC footprint and how this successful regional product struggled and ultimately failed on the national level -- with TV playing a large role in the demise.

The players are Jim Crockett and Vince McMahon and it is easy to draw parallels to John Swofford, who played football at UNC and later was the athletic director, and Jim Dulany, who ironically also attended UNC, playing basketball and earning a law degree.

And, yes, I said Vince McMahon. Say what you will about McMahon's product, but he is a shrewd and highly-successful businessman with a win-at-all-costs mentality. Crockett, on the other hand, was good business man, but not good enough to survive.

In the 1980s, Vince McMahon had his WWF arena shows broadcast by Madison Square Garden Network, PRISM in Philadelphia and New England Sports Network. The broadcast quality was professional grade.

In the 1980s, Jim Crockett used a local North Carolina production company and it showed. The TV lighting was sketchy and the lights were often shown, washing out the picture. There were audio failures, including one at a major Pay-Per-View event. And the picture (likely from the cameras being used) looked ok, but not as good as the one on the other channel you were just watching. The production value of the shows were underwhelming and average at best.

Does this sound like Raycom to anyone?

In 1984, McMahon went to Ted Turner and tried to buy the popular Saturday Night Wrestling time slot on WTBS. Turner, who was a wrestling fan, would not sell it to McMahon.

McMahon found away around that roadblock by buying Georgia Championship Wrestling, which held the time slot, from three of the four owners. The fans were pissed. The ratings went down. And Turner wasn't happy.

So McMahon was forced to sell the time slot to his rival, Jim Crockett, for $1 million. What sounded like a great deal at the time for Crockett turned out to be the first step toward potential bankruptcy.

Crockett had done an outstanding job in the Mid-Atlantic area using rising stars such as Ric Flair, Magnum T.A., Rick Steamboat, Greg Valentine and Roddy Piper.

But with the WTBS slot, Crockett expanded, sacrificing his traditional Carolina stronghold, for a larger footprint.

Sound like the ACC to anyone?

There was one small problem. McMahon had beaten Crockett to the punch on the national level. And now he had Crockett in his cross-hairs.

As Crockett tried to book arenas outside of his Mid-Atlantic footprint, he found out that McMahon often had exclusive deals and the NWA was forced into secondary arenas. TV stations around the country already had McMahon's wrestling show and some were reluctant to add another.

And then McMahon started raiding Crockett and other promotions around the country for stars like Steamboat, Piper and some guy named Hulk Hogan. With a new national push, Crockett's expenses rose, including the salaries of stars like Flair that he was forced to keep.

The best way to make back some of those loses? A new concept know as Pay-Per-View TV, which was much more profitable than the closed-circuit TV from an arena or movie theater.

But McMahon had also beaten Crockett to the punch in the cable TV world, strong-arming several cable providers into showing WWF PPVs exclusively at the expense of the NWA.

Four years after the million dollar check from McMahon, Crockett was facing bankruptcy and was forced to sell his wrestling company to Ted Tuner. While the company had its ups and downs over the next 12 years, it lost its backer, Turner, with the AOL-Time Warner merger.

And after significant financial losses -- often hidden on the parent company's payroll -- the company was sold in early 2001.

To Vince McMahon. Who then cherry picked the best performers.

But McMahon's greatest financial coup, which wasn't realized until over a decade later?

He obtained the rights to the massive NWA and WCW digital archive, which is a significant component to McMahon's huge monthly-subscription digital product of today, the WWE Network.

Does consolidation and digital rights sound like what we are seeing right now?

You can dismiss this little yarn or take it with a grain of salt, but the bottom line?

Jim Dulany is a better businessman than John Swofford.

John Swofford is out of his element outside of the Carolinas.

I'm willing to bet Dulany is whispering in ESPN's ear and/or pulling the strings when it comes to any ACC or Big 12 network.

And Dulany will instruct ESPN do whatever is in the best interest of the B1G.

Isn't that what a great businessman does?
[Post edited by timharv at 04/03/2016 9:00PM]