I don't think Scooch is saying FSU 1993 and 1999 would make the contracts equal.
ACC relies on FSU to be wicked awesome. They were hoping they got Miami and early ACC Vtech to be the 3 amigos. If anyone is to blame it's Miami. They have been awful since joining the ACC vs their historical relevance in the Big East. Which should be something FSU and Clemson should look at if they extracted themselves into the BIG/SEC. Of course it's all money and no one cares about the performance if the checks are guaranteed.
Clemson ironically became a second banana thankfully. The BIG will ALWAYS have these gigantic land grant schools (similar to the SEC) with their oodles of grads. We are going to constantly swim upstream vs them content wise and valuation wise. But being third isn't bad and having a contract tied up being third is not bad for SU and most of the ACC at this point.
Anyway, be thankful for ND, Swofford, ESPN and the ACCN, Crouthamel (for actually building the Big East and making SU Football great in the 80s hiring Mac), McNabb, Miami going on probation in/around 1995, and the Dome Ranger (why not)
Being 3rd becomes BAD as soon as it means being comparable in terms of money and recent football success to the AAC.
Most do not want to face simple facts about CFB. SoCar can go 5 straight years with a losing team and still expect to average more than 70K per game the next year.
Most ACC people grab thew same thing about basketball: for a league to be really sound, it must have teams that have such passionately loyal fans that they still buy tickets and watch even when their teams lose and lose and lose.
That always has been true of ACC basketball. It is not true of ACC football. It never was, and the formation do the ACC made it thus. 6 schools in the SoCon were a given and necessary for the new league to even start: Dook, UNC, NCSU, SoCar, Clemson, and Maryland. That sextet all agreed they wanted to get independent UVA. They also quickly rejected WVU because, they later said in public, <MMorgantown was too far away from most off the other schools and had no airport for planes larger than maybe 10 seats and had bad roads all round. They rejected VPI because none of the 6 campaigned hard for VPI and some UVA people said they would oppose UVA joining if VPI got in. And so Wake got in, even though the crisis that had led to the formation of a new league came because the 'small' schools in the SoCon had voted to band SoCon teams from going to bowls.
Wake made no sense except for basketball. So the ACC cursed itself from its birth. With UNC, Dook, and NCSU, there was less than 0 need to have another 'basketball power' in the state of NC.
UVA took no interest in promoting its sports back then, especially football. That led almost all top players from VA to leave the state, at least half of those going outside the ACC. That hurt ACC football talent levels and also meant that no radio or TV audience for ACC football developed in VA - until UVA hired George Welch. If VPI hd been in the early ACC, none of that would have happened. If WVU also had been in, the ACC radio network would have stretched to Pittsburgh, which then was a MAJOR hotbed area of HS football talent and a center of radio broadcasting of college sports, especially football.
Bad decisions in terms of football just kept being made. Time after time. And now either the ACC uses these next couple of years to smatly plan a new future, or else it will become a minor conference. It must somehow add larger state schools and schools located in areas with lots of talent. It must make certain that its teams that win Big and also teams that draw Big TV numbers get paid well.
