RALEIGH, N.C. _ During the weeks and months leading to the launch of the ACC Network, the people behind it have promoted both the scope of the coverage it promises and the breadth of its technical extravagance. There will be deeply-reported documentaries, they've said. And constant coverage of basketball. And, also, "robotic Vinten camera pedestals" and "26 2 LED lighting fixtures," according to a recent jargon-filled release lauding the network's new studio.
The ACC Network, created in partnership with ESPN, will soon become a reality. It launches on Aug. 22 at 7 p.m., broadcast from Studio G, a 2800-square foot space on the ESPN campus in Bristol, Conn. The debut will culminate a long-awaited moment of arrival that will help shape the future of the ACC, and define the legacy of John Swofford, the conference's longtime commissioner who led the league through years of uncertainty.
The old questions, about whether the network would exist, have been replaced by ones about distribution, programming and, most central to the network's unstated mission, long-term profitability. So goes the end of one journey and the start of a new one. And yet to understand the significance of the network's arrival is to understand the context of its journey, which began a decade ago in a time when Swofford wondered who he could trust.
For years questions followed him, speculation about the potential demise of the ACC _ "a lot of crazy stuff," Swofford, the league's commissioner since 1997, said recently. The rumors persisted throughout the late 2000s and early 2010s: Clemson and Florida State to the Big 12; maybe North Carolina and Virginia to the Big Ten; the specter that other conferences might plunder the ACC the same way the ACC did the old Big East.
When Maryland announced in 2012 that it was leaving the ACC for the Big Ten, it reinforced the perception of the ACC's vulnerability. For Swofford, friendly faces turned into potential adversaries. The commissioners of major conferences form a small fraternity; their paths often cross. About a decade ago, amid the massive realignment that swept through college athletics, those commissioners all had reason to be wary of each other.
At the places where they gathered, Swofford tried to read his rivals. During a July interview he smiled at the memory. Now it was long in the past. In the moment, though, it was like poker, wondering if the player across the table held a flush or nothing at all. Swofford described the game like this:
"You're sitting in meetings together and it's like, 'What's this guy doing? What's he up to?'
"It was very uncomfortable," he said. "Because, while you pretty much thought you knew that most of it was not going to happen, there's always that little doubt that, well, if the extreme comes about, there's a really small possibility that it could happen."
It was in that environment, in the middle of 2009, that Swofford first explored the possibility of a television channel devoted to the ACC. That summer, he called Dean Jordan, a Raleigh-based executive with the Wasserman Media Group. Jordan's expertise was, and is, in sports media rights negotiations.
As Swofford recalled, he asked Jordan "to put together some financials," and to provide an analysis of whether a network would be a worthwhile pursuit for the ACC. During a recent phone interview, Jordan remembered the discussion as "a general conversation that just kind of grew from there."
Ten years after that casual talk, the network is here. One older question has lingered: What took so long?
