The unofficial start to football season is here. On Tuesday, Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney will host his annual media golf outing at The Reserve on Lake Keowee.

This is the time when the media will get a rare opportunity to speak with every assistant coach on Swinney’s staff. You might recall, during the regular season the media only gets to speak with the coordinators and Swinney.

After spending all day talking and playing golf with the Clemson coaches on Tuesday, we head up to Charlotte on Thursday to cover the ACC’s Annual Football Kickoff. For two days we will speak with all 14 coaches in the ACC as well as two selected players from every school.

Clemson quarterback Deshaun Watson as well as linebacker Ben Boulware will be representing the Tigers along with Swinney.

Some of the hot topics at this year’s meeting will of course be who will be favored to win the ACC as well as the preseason All-ACC team and the preseason player of the year.

The media will also get to speak with ACC Commissioner John Swofford, who will address several items such as rules changes, instant replay, satellite camps and where the league stands with its television partner ESPN and a possible ACC Network in the future.

At the spring meetings back in May, the league was having discussions with ESPN about the possibility of a network.

“We have had some conversations and really what the substance of it was, from this point forward, all of the communications related to that are going to come from the commissioner,” Clemson athletic director Dan Radakovich told The Clemson Insider from Amelia Island, Florida on May 12. “So as we get into what we hope is the final stages of getting this done, communications will emanate from the commissioner’s office.”

However, a few weeks prior to those spring meetings, Radakovich told TCI the ACC Network is the first thing Swofford thinks about when he goes into his Greensboro, North Carolina office every day. He and the conference are very mindful of what is going on with the other Power 5 Conferences and their television networks.

Right now, the ACC and the Big 12 are the only two without their own networks. The Big 12 has decided not to launch a network, while the Pac 12 announced last week a deal with Twitter to live stream some of its sporting events from its platform.

The major concern for the ACC is not allowing itself to fall further behind the SEC and the Big Ten. In 2014, the Southeastern Conference generated $347 million in television money. According to forbes.com, $300 million of that came from ESPN between rights fees and the conference’s share of profits from the SEC Network.

In its first year, the SEC Network kicked off around $112 million for the SEC. In April, it was reported the Big 10 Conference and Fox Sports are close to a new media rights deal that could rival or surpass the SEC’s.

Early projections say the new deal could make more than $40 million annually for Big Ten schools.

The ACC has talked about looking into the possibility of starting its own network for several years, but it keeps getting pushed back because ESPN’s viewership has gone down in the last couple of years as more people are ditching their cable providers such as Comcast, Time Warner and DirecTV for streaming on the internet.

“Do we have to be where the Big Ten is? I don’t know if we will ever get there. If that is an aspiration, then it could be an aspiration that we chase forever. Do we need to get to where the SEC is? They have been ahead of us right now. How do we get in the game? That is what we need to be able to do as a league is get in the game and that is what this network will allow us to do,” Radakovich told TCI back in April. “When you start to wonder how many dollars and those types of things are coming in, you don’t know. That’s tough to account for right there because we don’t know. You don’t know and I don’t know.

“When those dollars come into Ohio State, how much of those dollars go to the university? How much of those dollars are taken by the university to run the general university and not specifically the athletic department? How much of that happens at Illinois, or Iowa, or Penn State? Maybe it’s none or maybe it’s a lot. The same thing within the SEC, how many of those dollars, when the president sees those new monies coming in, do they take a piece of that to help operate the rest of the university? Maybe they do, maybe they don’t.

“It’s clear they’re bringing in more revenue than we are and we have to be able to help mitigate that at some point and time, and the network is a way to do that.”