re: Florida State And Clemson Moving To The Big 12?

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If Fox or ESPN aren’t interested in paying the B1G or SEC more for those schools, why would they be interested in paying the Big 12 more?

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First of all they aren't on the same team, Fox and ESPN keep going back and forth trying to one-up each other.

From Fox's point of view why pay the big bucks to have FSU and Clemson in the B1G (the league they have influence over) when they could pay less to have them in the Big 12 to make that league more viable longterm? Its not like Clemson and FSU have other options.

From ESPN's point of view, FSU's desperation to get out of the ACC is on a level not seen before in college sports. They seem willing to burn down the conference and frick over ESPN (via sharing their ACC contract publicly) to try and gain leverage over the box they locked themselves in. ESPN has NO motivation to reward that sort of behavior by giving FSU a huge SEC payout if they succeed in using ESPN's trade secrets to unwind an ACC that is currently providing a lot of value for ESPN at a cheap price.

The X factor is CBS. Before they were very cheap about college football, but they have a new boss and that guy recently said they are willing to pay more for sports going forward (he called sports rights the core of the Paramount). So since the Big 12 has contracts that come up before the ACC, and they aren't tied to a network through a conference network like the SEC and B1G are, there is a chance that the Big 12 might blow the doors off expectations in revenue in the next 10 years.

Honestly FSU has been very fricking blatant in what their goals are and how they plan to achieve them. It is clear that they know they don't have any real leverage, and instead they are trying to use Florida sunshine laws to frick over ESPN so the ACC is sacrificed to save the entire structure of college sports contracts (which is why the B1G and SEC have supported the ACC in their fight against FSU). If they don't watch themselves they could see ESPN trash their program just to make an example out of them.