I Think you're making good points.

ESPN pays about $40M to each ACC program (not including ND who isn't football member), about $20M to each Big12 program (FOX pays the other $12M/program), and will be paying somewhere between $70M now, but approaching $100M by 2030 for each SEC program going forward until the deal is up.

If 4 ACC programs went from ACC to SEC, 4 ACC to BIG 10, and another 4 ACC to BIG 12:

ESPN would Pay $120M-$240M for the teams going to SEC, save $160M for teams going to BIG10, save $80M for teams going to BIG12, and then save an additional $80M for the remaining programs who don't get an invite to either 3.

At the end of the day this would be $80-$200M in savings for ESPN. And that's assuming all these programs would be full share.

As we saw with Oregon it's entirely possible, the SEC could try to add like 2 of FSU, UNC, Clemson, and Miami at Full-Shares, then 2 of UVA/VTech/GTech/NCSt as Half-Shares (which would potentially save ESPN money in short-term).

Really for ESPN this can mostly be considered shuffling the deck, and dropping the bottom programs. Hell it's possible ESPN can enter the Big10 deal by providing half the share (and Fox covering the other half for these additions) as a way of "settling" the GOR buyout. They'd be paying the Same or less, for Better games...