Long story short, ESPN sub-licensed the vast majority of the ACC games they were guaranteed by the ACC-ESPN contract(s), that among others, each year included 30 ACC football games and 60 ACC men's basketball games. They sub-licensed them to Fox RSNs( Fox Sports South now Bally Sports South?) and thus the collection of Fox Sports RSNs and affiliated non-FS RSNs as a group of "ACC RSN" affiliates. This was entirely separate from the Raycom Sports based ACC Network. Whenever talks heated up about an ESPN-based ACC Network, these sub-licensed games were inevitably the stumbling block, and how to get them back. ESPN insisted that if they didn't have the rights to all ACC games, they weren't interested in forming an ACC Network, a la their SEC Network. Eventually they must have knuckled under on this point of contention, or maybe the ACC sweetened the pot enough overcome their reluctance, but we'll probably never know what that was. No doubt, the good ol' boys at Raycom Sports probably got something, too, for simply bowing out gracefully. But apparently there was no way to get the rights back to the subset of games that they sub-licensed as RSN games, so we're still stuck with those, probably until the previous ACC-ESPN contract they were negotiated under end in after 2026-27. This is why we still have a handful of RSN football and men's basketball games.
