The annual ACC meetings held in Amelia Island this month have now come and gone, and the conference still exists. The question, though, seems to be will it exist in its current form three, five, or 10 years from now?

It feels that every time a conference holds league meetings, realignment talk pops up, as was the case with the ACC last week. Virginia is one of 15 member institutions trying to read the chess board, and determine what their next move, if any, should be.

As the ACC continues to fall further behind the SEC and Big 10 in both revenue and exposure, the league could be headed for unofficial relegation out of the D1 power structure, at least as far as football is concerned.

With realignment squarely back on the radar, we’re reviewing what we know and where UVa stands heading into the summer.

1. UVa is one of many schools exploring options, legal and otherwise.

The ACC schools are bound by the league’s Grant of Rights, which is in place until 2036 when the current TV deal with ESPN is set to expire. As of now, no team has been able to challenge the GOR, which would force a departing institution to leave its TV rights with the ACC until the end of the contract, which is simply untenable and would negate the upside of leaving the league before then.

What we know, based on reporting from Brett McMurphy and others, is that UVa is one of seven (or maybe even eight) ACC schools that have met and had lawyers reviewing the document to see if there is a workaround to an earlier exit should an opportunity come open. The other schools looking at those same options are North Carolina, Clemson, Florida State, Miami, NC State, Virginia Tech, and potentially Louisville. The other seven league schools have probably taken a look at the GOR, too, because if one of the two top leagues came calling, even if that came as a surprise, they’d want to know what they could do.

Simply put, there’s no reason to think the Grant of Rights would be easy to work around. If lawyers have reviewed the document and every school is still in the league, that means that no other leagues want those schools or they weren’t able to find a way out. The latter is far more likely, and in the recent round of reporting nobody indicated that any of the schools had found a way to leave the league and work around this document.

Virginia is smart to review its options, as every school should be doing in this scenario. That doesn’t mean it have one foot out the door or would attempt to challenge the ACC in court, but if other dominos start falling, UVa shouldn’t be in a position where it has to scramble to determine what’s next.

2. While UVa is seems desirable to other leagues, it’s hard to predict the future.

The school has long been mentioned as an attractive option to the SEC and the B1G, should they decide to raid the ACC at some point. Neither league has a team in the Commonwealth, currently the 12th most-populous state. Virginia Tech has had more success on the football field but UVa is the state’s flagship university with a better overall athletic department, a great academic reputation, and AAU membership, which appears to be a near non-negotiable for B1G membership.

It feels like UVa should have a seat when the music stops, should the two power leagues decide to pillage the ACC. But that’s not a certainty, and the math could become problematic to the point where those leagues decide to simply keep things the way they are, and let the ACC and other leagues try, and fail, to keep up financially.

The B1G, for example, could have added Washington and Oregon when USC and UCLA came on board but chose not to. Maybe that gets revisited but the rationale was that those two schools don’t add enough to the size of the league’s pie to justify splitting things with two more mouths. And if those two don’t bring in enough capital to make expansion worth it, would Virginia?

Perhaps the endgame isn’t two huge leagues that take the schools they want and UVa ends up in whatever new power structure emerges. But there’s still plenty of uncertainty out there, at least from a football perspective, about what comes next with playoff expansion on the horizon and so on.

3. While everyone seems to be looking out for their own interests, it doesn’t seem like enough are focused on the big picture.

It makes perfect sense for ACC schools to have a wandering eye in this “survival of the fittest” era. But the bigger question might be: where is all of this heading? Are all of these schools simply going to throw tradition and proximity aside to chase the cash? What happens if that money dries up?

A big reason for all of the shuffling we’ve seen is lack of centralized leadership in college football. There has long been talk of the Power-5 breaking off from the rest of the FBS to form a top-tier league of 60 or so schools, but now, it’s really two conferences informally breaking off from the rest from a financial standpoint.

Perhaps the ultimate destination, at least for football, will be a new structure. Still, the SEC and B1G schools aren’t going to line up to forfeit their financial advantage over the other conferences in favor of some collectively negotiated TV deal. With a lack of centralized leadership from the NCAA, the leagues and the schools in them may “break” college sports in their chase of a bigger payday or survival for their athletic departments. And nobody is there to stop them from doing just that.

1. What are the consequences of a growing revenue gap?

During this current TV deal, ACC payouts will exceed $50 million per school. That’s a far cry from what schools were pulling in a decade or two ago, despite the fact that the ACC will be further and further from the top two conferences in terms of payouts by the end of their deal with ESPN. As the ACC schools hit the $50 million mark, schools in the SEC and B1G will be closing in on $100 million per year. So that brings up the question: what does all this money do for the schools at the top and how does it hurt schools like UVa?

First, it’s unlikely that it would have some sort of catastrophic impact on the athletic department as a whole and its ability to field teams. The Olympic sports have continued to thrive, and even though the ACC will be way behind in revenue UVa can still run an athletic department on what it’s bringing in. But it could create an issue from a competitiveness standpoint.

The best coaches will want to coach in leagues with a much bigger budget for all sorts of things, from facilities to coaching staff salaries, etc. In that scenario, UVa probably isn’t winning a bidding war for a coach with a B1G or SEC school in pursuit, for example. Facilities would get further and further behind, though we may have already seen the high water mark for investment in those areas with NIL now a path for donor money. NIL could become even more lopsided towards the schools in the SEC and B1G, and eventually if the NCAA loses in court and players are deemed employees schools in those leagues would have more capital to pay their players or pay them more. And with schools like Vanderbilt doubling their TV revenue in a short time span, it’s harder to make the cases that the schools can’t afford to share that windfall with their student athletes.

It feels like recruiting would be the biggest area where the revenue gap would become a problem, and while UVa could still win its fair share of conference titles, winning national titles against SEC and B1G programs will be more difficult. The question is how much those schools invest in their non-revenue sports, potentially closing the gap on schools like UVa in tennis, lacrosse, and others.

2. What are the possible moves for the ACC to survive?

The league simply doesn’t have a lots of cards to play. Right now, the GOR agreement is keeping the league together. But at the same time it is sort of like a life vest made of lead; it’s meant to save them but ultimately its weighing the league down too.

If the ACC could get ESPN to negotiate its network-friendly TV deal, that could at least help the gap shrink a bit. But what’s ESPN’s incentive to do that? It’s getting a great deal on a lot of content that it doesn’t want to lose. Perhaps ESPN wants to keep the ACC alive as it partners with the league on the ACC Network and having several viable conferences is a good thing, but they only have to worry about that if schools attempt to flee and take the ACC to court over their TV rights. Right now, this feels like a dead end.

In the past, leagues tried to stave off irrelevance by going out and poaching from another conference. The problem right now, though, is that there aren’t many teams for the ACC to go after, and perhaps only one (Notre Dame’s full membership) that increases the value of the league. Attempting to add from the PAC-12 is a desperate move and, as with the B1G not adding Oregon or Washington, it doesn’t seem the networks would value their additions to the ACC, either. As for the Irish, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of upside to joining a third-place league for football, when the school values independence so greatly, especially given ND wouldn’t gain much financially by doing so. Perhaps if a governing body makes it almost impossible to get into the playoff without being in a league, something that’s a real long shot given the SEC and B1G want at-large teams in would turn Notre Dame’s head.

The ACC hangs on for a while longer but changes are inevitable.

The league’s position with relation to its rivals is getting worse, and while the revenue gap grows, the ACC may not truly be vulnerable in the short term. The SEC and B1G have picked off almost all of the big football brands at this point and certainly don’t need to add any more. There are some valuable brands in the ACC, but is it worth it to try and pick one off only to head into a protracted court battle that might end in the school having to go back to the ACC to avoid financial ruin?

Still, eventually the money will talk. Even if the ACC tries to move away from equal revenue sharing, awarding more TV money to schools making the College Football Playoff or NCAA Tournament, that’s a band-aid fix. Say Clemson makes the playoff and gets $55 million instead of the typical $45M. It would still potentially be $30+ million behind a B1G team, even if that team went 0-12.

It feels like the ACC is sort of stuck for now and eventually perhaps a school decides the financial gap is too big and tries to flirt with another league, hoping to win the court case against the ACC. That might be years off, when the downside isn’t as large as it would be now, with so many years left on the TV deal. But UVa fans who are also fans of the the ACC should start looking at UVa’s current position as a temporary one: It may be another decade or so but the ACC is very likely going to change whether UVa sticks around or not.