Quote:
Originally Posted by Senator Clay Davis
The prestige and national appeal of Duke and Carolina is high, but moreso in basketball. All of this realignment stuff is more or less about securing massive contracts for football. Virginia Tech has been far and away the ACC's best football school for a decade now, and I do think the SEC would rather add two seperate TV markets than simply one with two great programs (hence why they added A&M and....Missouri? Not a big national appeal there, but access to a new TV market). Unfortunetly realignment is about appealing to TV executives and not the quality of the universities (Rutgers in the Big 10???). Executives will pay more for two seperate markets than one.
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Adding Duke and UNC brings basketball into play. There's no group of fans crazier than those two, and Duke in particular has fans all over the place (particularly in NYC). The manner in which TV revenues have been reaped has been forcing local cable carriers to add the conference networks to their programming and then taking a dollar or two per subscriber. If a number Duke basketball games are going to be available only on the SEC network you better believe that there would be very real pressure for that network to be available in a number of markets.