NCJ - I have to admit I have never seen numbers of ACC finances (and I have seen a bunch) where the FB revenue was bigger than the BB revenue. The numbers I have seen are around the following exerted from a CBS sportsline article
" ... The overall regular season and tournament basketball conference revenue is critical to the business model. The Atlantic Coast Conference is a $100 million business -- generating more than $28 million from Raycom/Jefferson Pilot Sports for regular season basketball rights (a 65 percent increase over the previous year), $5.3 million from the ACC Tournament, and $12.8 million from the NCAA Tournament.
To compare, the football program produces $21.1 million from regular season television games and $20.4 million from bowl games (including the 2002 Maryland Terrapins BCS appearance)."
Reference link
http://cbs.sportsline.com/general/story/6262652
That makes it more $45 M BB and $40 M FB. And from the FB bowl revenue you have to deduct the $6-$7 million in travel money given directly to the participating teams to cover their expenses which comes off the top before distribution. I am sure there is some in the BB side as well for the NCAA tourney but not more than $.5 - $1 M. That makes it more like $44 BB and $34 FB for distribution.
Now as you point out that is before gate reciepts for both FB and BB which are held by the individual schools. Would we do better with Syracuse and Miami vs. Duke and Wake at home - probably yes for those games assuming we have a good team. But we would have to replace Auburn and other old SEC schools with directional powder puffs (like the SEC schools do) to balance our schedule. In some ways upgrading the conference will simply replace strong OOC games with stronger in conference games so one can argue the overall attendance effect. In reality I think our attendance is due more to how good our team is and how well we think they are going to do rather than the competition. But in either case, I don't believe Syracuse or Miami will travel well to Atlanta and we will have to fill the stadium ourselves as opposed to counting on the hordes from Auburn, etc.
So I stand by my statement that right now it is BB that drives the ACC coffers. Given the $6 B NCAA tourney TV contract and the ACC TV contract that makes sense. Could it change with a new FB league and with a new FB Bowl setup/playoff/confernce championship? Sure but that is playing to a new dynamic and will require replacing significant BB revenue driven primarily from the schools this post started out talking about booting out.
And it brings me back to my other point. The NC schools were the ones that bankrolled the resurection of GT athletics from the failed independent FB experiment. I for one don't want to walk around talking about how idiotic these schools are, denegrating them and talking about how we ought to boot em out when they gave som much to us. They brought us into their family when we needed them a whole lot more than they needed us. If FB is to be the wave of the future we owe them the same courtesy.