Great news for @accwbb & @ACCBaseball fans! The entire ACC women's basketball & ACC baseball tournaments will now air on @accnetwork. No more searching your TV for the early-round games. Let's go! https://t.co/cNengvtTpq

ANNOUNCEMENT!

Moving forward, all early-round ACC Women's Basketball Tournament and ACC Baseball Championship games will now be on @accnetwork - while ESPN or ESPN2 will continue to carry the Championship games!

@SBJ | @SmittySBJ: https://t.co/xHk3aibQ3E

Now just waiting on location for the tournament

But Raycom has continued its involvement with the ACC since then, producing ACC games for ESPN and the ESPN-owned ACC Network, and doing a lot on the digital side, including the ACCDN Confidential channel with VUit. And they still hold some ACC rights, which is why they're a key part of a new deal to move early-round ACC Tournament baseball and women's basketball games that had been on Bally Sports South to ACC Network.

Sinclair (which owns Bally through Diamond Sports Group), Raycom (which actually owns these particular rights), and ESPN (which owns ACC Network) have now come together for a deal to switch these to ACC Network beginning with the next editions of these tournaments next year.

One potential downside for fans is for pure cord-cutters who don't have even a virtual MVPD package, as ACCN is not available outside a bundle (and while Bally Sports South currently is not, that's set to change this fall with the Bally Sports+ launch). But considering that ACCN is much more available through vMVPDs than Bally Sports networks are (on the vMVPD side, ACCN is available through fubo TV, Sling, Hulu + Live TV, DirecTV Stream, and Vidgo, while the only one of those carrying Bally networks is DirecTV Stream), there are at least options for those who don't have traditional cable or satellite.

Meanwhile, this is also advantageous for ESPN and ACC Network, which can now say they have the entire rights to these tournaments. That helps both on-air (no awkward promotion of events on other networks) and off-air (no outside networks to work with on scheduling, easier marketing of tournaments they have full rights to). And while this is a slight content loss for Bally Sports South, it's not a particularly crucial one; college sports has usually been additional content rather than key content for those RSNs. And for Raycom, under their current production model, it shouldn't matter too much which network carries the games they're producing.

ACC Network strikes deal with Raycom to carry WBB and baseball tournament games that had been on Bally Sports South https://t.co/tdFmN25cjE pic.twitter.com/OuCycypHCK

— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) August 17, 2022

Nice