I totally understand that it's pretty cool for the ACC to be the third most viewed property. But that and $2 will buy me a hotdog. What is important here is how that translates into dollars.

And it doesn't translate into more dollars for ACC schools. If a conference has 40 or 50% more members, it dang well better bring in significantly more dough than another conference. And BTW, I think the Big12's bowl payouts are actually more than the ACC's. Futhermore, Big12 schools have additional revenue options such as the Longhorn Network and OU TV that the ACC schools do not.

It is good for ESPN that more folks watch the ACC, but it's not all that good for the ACC schools, unless the ratings differences are substantial.

And just from an exposure perspective, most schools have 3 or 4 compelling matchups per season. These are games the networks want to broadcast. So a league with 14 members and their 50-60 compelling games will obviously have more viewers than a league with 10 teams and less than 40 compelling games. Any objective comparison of the ACC and Big12 should factor in the number of programs. For the ACC to be considered better, the ACC should be blowing them away in these categories, and they are not.

And don't even get me started about ESPN providing a network for 1 Big12 school, while it can't scrape the resources together for an ACC Network.