Some great, some bad, but overall the first year of the ACC Network was a success
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 13, 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.
Increased exposure
ACC schools, which had to invest millions of dollars in production facilities as part of the network launch, enjoyed the increased exposure, especially for sports other than football and men’s basketball.
“This has been a great opportunity for us to further tell the story of N.C. State and who we are as an institution,” N.C. State athletic director Boo Corrigan said. “It’s an opportunity for people to take pride in who we are and show off our students, what they’re doing athletically, the way that they comport themselves. Especially things that otherwise people wouldn’t have an opportunity to see, like a volleyball match or a soccer match or wrestling. Nothing compares to seeing the excitement in the building when we’re wrestling against the team down the street with a full house in Reynolds.”
One of the lessons of Year 1 might be that the network, if anything, underestimated the fervor of its fans, especially during basketball season. Its ACC-focused studio shows, whether from Mark Packer’s basement studio or the football show featuring an unchained Mark Richt, were one of the network’s strong points.
But on some Saturday basketball marathons, the network aired a pre-recorded version of Packer and Durham instead of a basketball-focused live show at halftime and between games. That was deliberate, as the network felt its way through staffing and the best use of its studio personalities, but expect that to change in Year 2.
“Some of this is getting our legs underneath of us and figuring out where our resources align and what we can do, but that is another area of opportunity, to figure out how we serve those pregames and halftimes and postgames, for sure,” McCollum said.
While ESPN gave the network a corporate polish and made it a lab for new technology, the frequent use of remote production teams and student labor occasionally led to technical glitches. Mike Brey’s experience after a win was typical. The Notre Dame coach sat down with ACC Network broadcasters Steve Schlanger and Dan Bonner and donned a headset. But Brey’s microphone didn’t work, and he could only be faintly heard through the broadcasters’ microphones. That happens, but instead of cutting the interview short, it continued for several questions with Brey barely audible, like nothing was wrong.
What was meant to be a tribute to the Durham family during the Georgia Tech-North Carolina game with Wes Durham on play-by-play went awry when the network played a clip of current radio announcer Jones Angell instead of Woody Durham, Wes’ late father and the longtime voice of UNC football and basketball.
Running long
Scheduling was a bigger issue at times, most notably on what should have been one of the network’s biggest nights: the reveal of the men’s basketball schedule, already later than usual on September 12. The network’s banner live schedule show was delayed, and delayed, and delayed again by a women’s soccer game between Florida State and Colorado that went into overtime as basketball fans fumed for 32 minutes (and Virginia accidentally released its schedule early).
That became a theme: The first half of Duke’s game against Georgia State in October was wiped out entirely when N.C. State’s volleyball match at Miami went an extra set, replete with several instant-replay reviews. Later, the ACC Network had a remote studio set up on Louisville’s campus in February for an hour-long studio show between a baseball game against Wright State and a basketball game against Syracuse. To the surprise of no one who’s ever watched college baseball, the baseball game lasted longer than the scheduled three-hour window and wiped out the studio show entirely.
“We will continue to look at how we schedule live events and start times and what programming follows some of those live events,’ McCollum said. “We love live event lead-ins. Those are always great things. But we may continue to look at some of those start times.”
And some of what provoked fan and viewer amusement was entirely outside the control of ESPN or the ACC. Late-night commercial inventory often ended up in the hands of as-seen-on-TV advertisers like Bulbhead, which at times seemed to get more attention than the ACC’s actual corporate partners like Food Lion and Bojangles’. Hunter Ellis, the TV spokesperson for BattleVision glasses and Night Hero binoculars, was at times the network’s most recognizable face after dark. (Efforts to reach Bulbhead for comment were unsuccessful.)
Moving into Year 2, there are also things the network did well that it can do even better. The Duke basketball documentary that accompanied the network launch was excellent, and its behind-the-scenes series with the North Carolina men’s basketball team and other all-access programs were of high production quality and audience appeal.
With the ACC on hiatus, there’s time to plan more of that — and finish the six-part, nine-hour documentary on the history of the ACC tournament that’s currently in production.
“It forces you to try to take a deep breath and strategize a bit more and brainstorm a bit more than you typically have time to during a sports season,” McCollum said.
The change from the ACC’s traditional partnership with ESPN and Raycom’s over-the-air affiliates was a jarring one, and there were growing pains for fans and the network alike. But the network did what it was supposed to do in terms of programming. Whether it will do what it’s supposed to do for the ACC’s bottom line remains to be seen.
This story was originally published April 1, 2020 at 2:28 PM.
