I'm pretty sure ESPN sets the time for the ACC championship game to fill out the ABC schedule on Saturday. Big 12 in the morning, SEC in the afternoon (once it shifts to ABC from CBS, but they're not going to have the ACC go against the SEC anyway), and ACC at night.
My guess is that they were weary of varying the snap count too much because of the very young OL and because we seemed to have quite a few false starts even without varying the snap count a ton.
They would ordinarily go to the Rose Bowl, but it has been reported that the Rose is considering selecting Penn State instead because tOSU has been there recently.
Bijan definitely had rough days against the two best teams he faced (12 for 24 yards against TCU and 21 for 57 yards against Alabama), while Corum never had a game below 4.6 yards per carry (other than his two carries against tOSU). It may come down to whether the "voters" appriciate the differences in how hard each guy had to work for their yards.
The fact that so many of the kicks seemed designed to go to the front corners of the endzone always suggested to me that they were purposefully having him kick it there instead of kicking it into the endzone, but there is no way to know.
You can think of it this way, the donors are literally buying the players' NIL (and potentially time) and then giving it to the charities for their mission.
Maybe I could buy all the teams you mentioned leaving, but that still leaves more than 10 teams with no better options. The ACC will still exist for the same reason as the Big XII.
It does look like the process may be slightly different now than before the most recent negotiations: https://big12sports.com/news/2019/5/23/211718886.aspx
Note that the Sugar Bowl was treated separately from the rest in 2016-17, even though that was another year that it was not a semifinal. May be nothing, but there may be a distinction.
It's weird that they would not include that in their bowl selection section on their website then. https://big12sports.com/news/2019/5/23/211718886.aspx
All of the current projections have TCU in the playoff and the Sugar Bowl selecting Kansas State, presumably after losing to TCU in the Big 12 championship.
Is there any chance the Sugar Bowl would select 8-4 Texas over 9-4 Kansas State? I have not seen that projected anywhere.
So that leaves 7 teams that have never won a championship:
Men's Basketball
Soccer
Softball
Beach Volleyball
Men's Outdoor Track and Field
Women's Golf
Men's Cross Country