Jim Delany is not a happy man today.

ACC is prepared to announce a grant of media rights agreement has been reached.  That cuts off the financial incentive for another conference to chase a current ACC school.

In other words, if a school decides to leave the ACC for, oh, say, the Big Ten, then its media revenues go to the ACC – and not to the school – for the length of the Grant of Media Rights agreement. Translation: you’re not leaving the league.

Even worse for Delany?  Note the number of schools that are parties to the agreement.  Then consider that the ACC is officially a 14-team conference (for football, anyway).  You do the math on what that means.

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UPDATE:  Official announcement here.

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Practice makes perfect.

Auburn reviews itself in the wake of the Selena Roberts story, finds nothing to see there, moves on.

Name that caption: new threads for a new era

This comes via EDSBS.

One day, those kids are going to let Dad know about this.  And it won’t be pretty.

Agent to the stars

Talk about your unholy trinity:

While Finebaum has been off the radio for the past three months, he has been busy elsewhere.

Prior to leaving WJOX, he hired a new national agent, Nick Khan, whose clients include political commentator Keith Olbermann, CNN legal analyst Nancy Grace…

How this guy manages to stay sane interests me.  Unless he was never sane in the first place.

I wonder if he throws a client Christmas party.

He’s overselling something.

Shorter Pat Dooley:  My ranking Jeff Driskel the fifth-best quarterback in the SEC is proof, I tells ‘ya, that the conference is loaded with quality quarterbacks.

Jim Delany, director of programming

Barry Alvarez says the Big Ten will be going to a nine-game conference football schedule in a couple of years.  That will mean an unbalanced home schedule every year for half of its teams, which isn’t ideal – the conference pondered going to a ten-game schedule – but what can you do when you need to feed the beast?

The beast being the Big Ten Network, that is.

“To improve our league football-wise, we all agree as directors and driven by our commissioner (Jim Delany) that our non-conference schedule has to get better,” Alvarez said. “[Delany] is going to the table to re-negotiate TV contracts and we have to improve that inventory. Our non-conference schedule is not strong at all.”

The math is inevitable.  There’s just more money in TV than anywhere else.  They’ll need to tweak the postseason selection process so that none of the big conferences get burned by the committee for generating more product for their homegrown networks strengthening their regular season schedules.  Something tells me Delany will get that worked out sooner or later.

And you can figure Mike Slive is watching closely.

One more thing on Mark Emmert’s plate

When they’re not patting themselves on the back about all the money rolling in or figuring out the new and improved postseason at this week’s meeting, college football’s movers and shakers may be privately discussing something even bigger.

One group, though, will surely dominate the cocktail party and golf course conversations, even while its influence in the future of college football further weakens: the NCAA.

As college athletics sifts through an avalanche of foundational issues, the credibility and viability of its governing body has never been more in question. Among realignment that has deepened separation of the haves and have-nots, the legal challenges to the NCAA’s amateurism model, an explosion in football and television money and embarrassing misconduct in the NCAA’s enforcement arm, the calls to start over are louder than ever.

Starting over could be accomplished by either restructuring D-1 to split into, for want of a better phrase, separate divisions of the haves and the have-nots.  Or the haves could simply pick up their ball and go home, which would be an enormous disaster for the NCAA, considering what such a move would do to its basketball tourney.

One thing’s for sure – the natives are getting increasingly restless.

The topic has reached such a boil in recent years, it was even broached directly to NCAA president Mark Emmert at an athletics directors convention in September 2011, when realignment had gripped the entire industry following the ACC’s raid of the Big East for Syracuse and Pittsburgh.

According to a person in the room, whose version of events was confirmed by two others, one athletics director asked Emmert directly whether it was time for the top football conferences to split from the lower-tier conferences of the Football Bowl Subdivision, and perhaps even away from the NCAA altogether.

“I think he responded in a way that, it was a little political,” said the person, who spoke to USA TODAY Sports on the condition of anonymity because the meeting was supposed to be private. “It was more along the lines of, we’re going through a lot of changes now and he had heard about those kind of backroom-type conversations, and he basically said it might be time to put everything out on the table and talk through all these issues that we see in the future. He didn’t back away from it.”

Whatever that means.  He sure hasn’t done anything concrete about it, either.  Of course, given his recent track record, maybe doing nothing as long as possible is the most prudent course of action for Emmert.

Settling how to settle it on the field

They’re meeting this week to figure out the structure and composition of the playoff selection committee.  The good news is that it sounds like they’re giving the cold shoulder to the coaches.

Current coaches have lost their voice in football’s postseason. The American Football Coaches Association, whose poll comprises one-third of the BCS formula, says it has had no communication with conference commissioners about the playoff selection process.

“When they were trying to get what turned out to be the BCS 15 years ago, the commissioners were begging us to allow our poll to be part of the process,” said Grant Teaff, executive director of the AFCA. “If they need us this time, they’ll probably let us know.”

Yeah, well, don’t sit by that phone too long, Grant.

The bad news is that the overall process may be as subjective in its own way as ever.  Maybe more.  Let our old friend Bill Hancock spin it for you.

Hancock said he believes the commissioners would give the committee “a jury charge” but ultimately it’s up to each member to determine what factors to consider, such as with the NCAA basketball committee.

“I’d be very surprised if we have an RPI or any other kind of universal metric,” Hancock said. “I think instead there will be several different sets of data that the members can look at. What kind of data? We don’t know. Obviously their decision will be made based on common sense: Who did you play? How did you play them? How did you do? Who was injured when you played? How was the weather? Just common-sense things that any sports fan would use.”

Here’s an example of common sense, from last season’s (hypothetical) playoff pool.

A team that doesn’t play in the SECCG gets in the semis ahead of a team it lost to in the regular season.  Makes you wonder what Mike Slive’s “jury instruction” to the committee would have been, doesn’t it?

All I see here is a road map on how to get to an eight-team playoff sooner.  Lather, rinse, repeat – at least as long as TV will pay for the shampoo.