Say we get a invite to the acc
And we accept…then in 5 year’s basketball starts catching up to football in tv viewership and the big east gets a great tv deal… then in 10 years the acc falls apart and schools start jumping to other conferences … and a school like duke wants to save their basketball and accepts a invite to the big east… but the big east won’t let uconn back in … and we are stuck in the aac 2… without any way out… could happen
I'd put the likelihood of any of these scenarios as low (with the exception of the ACC eventually needing to reload).
For this to be true you'd need basketball rights to triple in value, in the next 5 years, in an environment where streaming is threatening to blow up the current revenue and rights fees model. Then... you'd have to have Duke deciding that rather than building a conference with the leftover conference mates and then selecting teams to join them.. would decide that it would rather send it's football team to independence to join a basketball league comprised of schools whom they've never partnered with before AND those same schools (presumably out of spite) would then lock out their former conference mate who has double (at least depending on how things go down tomorrow night) the national titles than the rest of the schools combined (excluding "new member" Duke).
I think the more likely scenario would be for Duke and the leftover larger brands to select schools to join them, rather than choosing to jump into some other league.
Ultimately though, you make the best decision you can based on the known information at the time. You don't bypass a good opportunity on the slim chance it could go bad... now if somehow they had information that made any of these scenarios seem more likely, then that might chance the equation; but only because the chance of it going bad would be believed to be greater at the time the decision is made.