I'm not sure if "negotiate" is the right word. He certainly agreed to it. I have posted both the ORIGINAL Grant of Rights (less than 4 pages) and the EXTENSION to the Grant of rights (just over 1 page) and neither one is a complex document. I highly doubt that Dan did ANYTHING to actually "write" the document.
Yes, at the time of the original GOR, Maryland had just left, and I believe more than half of the P5 viewed GORs as a super-slick way to set forth an additional penalty on schools that tried to jump to another P5 conference.
HOWEVER, it should be noted that since the ORIGINAL GOR was created, a lot has changed, both for the conference and Division I-A football. On the ACC side, the CONSTITUTIONAL exit fee has continued to rise, making it more and more obvious that the GOR "damages" (vague as they are) actually constitute an impermissible DUPLICATIVE exit penalty. Second, the P5 schools have seen a new wave of expansion, with two conferences (Big 12, PAC) timing their jumps to the EXPIRATION of their GORs, while the ACC was stuck with another 10 years.
And I know for a FACT that the extra 10 years was not a part of the ORIGINAL GOR, it was something that ESPN forced us to do at gunpoint in order to create the ACC Network.
So I wouldn't put this all on Dan. Might he be imperfect in certain ways? Sure. But the GOR nonsense should not be on him, it should be on the commissioners.
