http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nca...t/1752757/
"Each time the ACC puts out a trite statement with nothing to turn those empty promises into unbreakable bonds, it becomes more and more obvious: The future of the conference is at the mercy of Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany and the SEC's Mike Slive. And until the ACC's schools agree to a so-called "grant of rights" like the once-shaky Big 12 did last year, those solidarity statements aren't worth the Internet bandwith it took to Tweet them.
A grant of rights, in case you haven't been following the realignment carousel for the past 2 ½ years, is powerful because it requires schools to sign their media rights to the conference for the length of the contract. In other words, if Oklahoma wanted to leave the Big 12, for instance, it couldn't bring its television rights with it to another league. In the case of the Big 12, that's about $200 million.
And that matters. That binds. That can be taken seriously."
I had no knowledge of the "grant of rights". Signing a conference's school to this makes a $10 million dollar buyout look like a pimple.
Realignment is, unfortunately, not over, and again unfortunately, UAB is not positioned to benefit as an active participant. As a domino, sure, and we might yet fail upwards, but the BoT has hamstrung us quite effectively.