Lars Tiffany was the final guest of the season on Packer and Durham, the ACC Network's morning talk show. The Virginia lacrosse coach talked about the impact of the NCAA's cancellation of spring sports with Mark Packer and Wes Durham on Friday, March 10, and that was the last live event on the new network in its inaugural 2019-20 season.
With ACC sports entirely on hiatus, Packer and Durham shut down production and the first year of the ACC Network came to an unexpectedly early end with everything else, long before its August anniversary.
So: In an abbreviated Year 1, what went well? And what needs fixing?
In many ways, the ACC Network did exactly what it said on the package: It brought unprecedented coverage to the ACC, especially sports beyond football and men's basketball, and gave the conference a platform to showcase itself that it had lacked, airing 336 events _ including 41 football games, 110 men's basketball games and 60 women's basketball games _ and more than 1,300 hours of live programming in seven months, including 13 remote studio shows at big games and events, the culmination of years of planning and discussions that started even before the official announcement in 2016.
"We had a lot of runway by design," said Stacie McCollum, the ESPN vice president who oversees the day-to-day operations of the network. "That gave us the opportunity to do a lot of homework and understand who the ACC fan is, the brand and their expectations, and cater the network toward that fan base"
With ESPN's muscle behind it, the network gained immediate carriage on every major provider save Comcast, nearly 70 million households in total, a headstart not every collegiate network has had. Given how much the ACC has riding on the network, a joint venture with ESPN that represents the conference's financial future, broad carriage was essential.
There were other, even quieter achievements: The network made history as an almost entirely female-led network, although the ESPN college networks executive who oversaw its launch, Rosalyn Durant, was recently moved to Disney's theme parks division and replaced by a male. And the single most important element to the ACC and ESPN _ how much money this joint venture will bring them _ remains uncertain at this point.
