Unintentional honesty is always fun. There’s the confirmation of what has been rumored, plus the hilarious attempts to walk it back. The latest, TCU AD Chris Del Conte talking about the Big 12.

Del Conte is in Lubbock this morning speaking to a Committee for Champions breakfast on the Texas Tech campus. According to Chris Level, who is the publisher of RedRaiderSports.com and a co-host of a radio show on 104.3 FM in Lubbock; he Tweeted that Del Conte said that the once dead Big 12 “now has schools like Florida State, Clemson and Miami trying to get in.”

This is called a confirmation, and it’s actually on the record.

Not that Del Conte is actually in a hurry to expand the Big 12 — now that TCU is in.

“From my standpoint of right now, I want to stay let’s take our breath. We are in a position of strength. Let’s not rush into anything. We know expansion has to happen. It may not be for a while. We are in the catbird seat right now. We don’t need to rush it. You are excited all of these teams want into the Big 12 and two years ago it was going to disintegrate.”

So how did Del Conte attempt to walk it back? By claiming that he was only commenting on the rumors of teams trying to get into the Big 12. Of course he was. Not actual ACC programs trying to get into to the Big 12.

As for the abrupt and sudden instability of the ACC. Dan Wetzel blames it on the ACC and Big East not being aggressive enough in pushing the playoff structure in college football to 8 teams.

That is why for the ACC, Big East and other conferences, the risks are enormous here, the stakes considerable.

They still have their best stability card left to be played, one move that can strengthen their leagues, assure their future and likely stem the realignment tides that don’t bode well for them: They could scream, politick and push relentlessly for the creation of an eight-team playoff that features six automatic bids and two at-large selections, with the quarterfinals and semifinals played on campus and the title game bid out.

The odds of getting that done, at this point, are slim to none, if not impossible. Too much time probably has passed. If these leagues ever do die, it’ll be because of passivity, inertia and complimentary his-and-her Caribbean cruises courtesy of the bowl lobby.

Dan Wetzel is one of the biggest proponents for the playoff system in college football. He is the author of the book: Death to the BCS. So, it seems amusing to me that he is essentially advocating adapting the BCS to playoffs. Six automatic bids plus two at-large.

I’m not sure he is right. Especially since his reasoning is that a 8-team playoff would be super-giant money for all conferences. Coupled with the potentially easier path into the playoffs if you were in the Big East or ACC, is a disincentive to jump to other conferences. That completely discounts the greed of programs. It wouldn’t change the envious, lustful eyes of programs at the money going to other conferences on TV deals they get. FSU would still be pissed at the difference between the ACC TV deal and the SEC’s.

The  ACC media deal with ESPN continues to get scrutinized. The Clemson AD revealed how big football mattered when he stated that the split in revenue was about 80% football related and only 20% for basketball.

TN: In your opinion, how does that move affect the ACC?

TDP: The ACC- we just got back from our spring meetings. Certainly, there were a lot of things discussed down there. The conference and the membership well understand what is happening. For example, in this latest contract with ESPN, 80% of it is generated by football. As good as basketball has been in the ACC, it is very evident just through this contract that football has to be very, very relevant. And the conference is well aware of that and they are going to be turning over every stone that they can and not just sitting on this contract. For example this new contract has two look-in windows- one at five years and one at 10 years. The purpose of that – in talking with ESPN people and our people in the same room – is to look at the end of five years where are we- competitively, what’s our performance, and does it merit a significant increase in the rights fee. There’s no question that on ESPN, the rights to television money is larger than any other conference. They’ve got other- the SEC has CBS and other conferences have other carriers, but there is tremendous exposure for the ACC football games as well as basketball games and other Olympic sports. As far as exposure, it’s a very good contract. Dollar wise as far as what ESPN is paying, it’s at the top, but overall because of the lack of CBS, you don’t have the same kind of dollars that other conferences have. But, having said that, ESPN has made it very clear that the purpose of writing in those look-ins is to see where we are in five years. You don’t wait until the end of the 15 years to say, ‘hey, how are we doing?’ That’s the purpose of the five-year and the ten-year look-in to challenge our conference and all of us associated with the conference know that football is extremely important and we have to perform and do everything we can to perform.

TN: Does the ACC contract put the conference’s schools at a competitive disadvantage?

TDP: You’ve got to look at what occurred during the period of time that it was negotiated. One of the interesting things that I’ve heard, with regards to the negotiations is that the conference didn’t do a good job negotiating. What’s interesting is that a lot of these conferences use the same consultants when dealing with the networks. When I came out here from the Big XII to the ACC, we had the same consultant that we had in the Big XII, and so what you have as a package has to speak for itself and provide whatever leverage that you have to negotiate at the highest rate. Some of these contracts- you’re really not privy to- they’re not subject to FOIA because they are privately owned and not for non-profit so you can’t get it there. The only way you can get information- not the provisions- is through tax returns which is always retrospective. You try to understand where you are, but you don’t have a quick and easy way to see what the provisions are. For example as reported, in the Pac 12, when they negotiated their contract- I guess it came about a year after the ACC negotiated its contract- at the time Fox and ESPN with the ACC were bidding against one another. What occurred in the Pac 12, I guess it was NBC Comcast, they came in as a bidder and Fox and ESPN joined forces to keep the other out of the market so that drove up the market value of that contract because of the market dynamics of what occurred at that particular point and time- a new group wanting to come in and get a piece of the college football landscape. And Fox and ESPN determined not to let them have a piece of the landscape so they came together and joined forces to preempt NBC Comcast. Then on top of it, the Pac 12 pulled in all of the multimedia contracts from all of the member institutions which pull that out of the control of the individual school and put it in the conference office, and now they have the multimedia rights. They control these third tier rights for the conference schools, which is part of that figure. Here, you say, ‘ok, what’s it worth to Clemson if you look at the Pac 12 model?’ We probably on our rights pull in 4.5 million annually and maybe a little more so you add that on top- that’s your sponsorships, radio, printed publications, and all of that. So, you could pull in those kinds of rights and put it on top of your television contract and instead of it being 17 million, it’s 21 million in a similar format as the Pac 12. Not being privy and not knowing what’s in the contracts, you don’t know what rights are in there. You only know what’s reported, and that’s sometimes accurate and sometimes not accurate. The conference offices don’t release those contracts and the only thing you can look at are the tax returns of the not-for-profit conference member offices. You don’t know what the provisions are or where those numbers are coming from.

For what it is worth Clemson’s AD also expressed confidence in the ACC in understanding how important football is to the conference.

That 80-20 split is also enlightening as to why the basketball schools in the Big East are full of bluster, but little else. They know (or at least they should) that if the football splits off, they will see their TV revenue (and exposure) fall through the floor. They’d be lucky to get more than $3 million a year on the deal.

On the whole debate of the ACC being a basketball conference. That the conference doesn’t care (enough) about football and football interests. A UNC blogger is about sick of it.

Being traditionally good at basketball is sin; it drives football coaches away, it makes the TV executives sad, it upsets the natural order of things and leads to conference doom. Doom, I say!

Yawn.

These folks can never actually delineate the point when the ACC and its member schools “chose” basketball over football. Because it never happened. The best you can say is that in 1953, the member schools left the Southern Conference in part to participate in post-season play, and eventually established higher academic standards than the SEC. Beyond that, the ACC pursued football at every turn.

Almost every expansion move has been wholly football-related. Georgia Tech had one NCAA appearance before joining the conference in 1979; the same goes for Florida State when they signed on in 1991. Miami and Boston College were pure football plays, while Virginia Tech was forced upon the conference but still was only known for their gridiron performance. By the time of the last expansion, their weren’t that many good schools willing to jump ship, and still the conference got the best regional football programs available.

Even in Chapel Hill, football success is constantly being chased. Kenan Stadium has been expanded twice in the last twenty years.

He makes a good case. And while UNC is clearly a basketball school, it can’t be denied how they have chased football success in the last 15 plus years. Failed. But it has definitely been chased.

Perception plays a role. It’s how everyone else views the ACC. The ACC offices are in Charlotte, NC. Hence the conference favors the NC schools — and those schools lean basketball. ACC Commissioner Swofford is a former UNC AD. You have two member institutions in Duke and Wake Forest (also located in NC) that are primarily about basketball.

There’s also the fact that even when the conference has expanded for football, the votes were not unanimous (and at time bitterly fought). Add in the generally poor ACC officiating in football — with seemingly little apparent interest in improving it. Plus careless to downright stupid conference scheduling that seems to punish football programs — last year having FSU and Clemson meet early in the season, and the week after both programs faced quality non-con opponents. This despite the fact that both were expected to contend for divisional titles is an example. Meanwhile, basketball scheduling works very hard to set the matches in the right time.

And of course, there is this past year’s acceptance of Pitt and Syracuse. A reaction to the potential expansiopocolypse of the Pac-12 getting to part of the Big 12 while the SEC takes more. Competitively it has been seen by most as something that does more for basketball and next to nothing in football. Afterall, Syracuse has been really bad for most of the decade in football. Pitt has been distinctly mediocre. Both, however, have been very strong in basketball.