Wow - I completely disagree with this. The ACC is the best basketball conference overall, but I don't think that there's any "fear" of ACC basketball whatsoever. Outside of the basketball blue bloods like Duke, UNC, Kansas, Indiana, Kentucky and UCLA, the best way to fund your basketball program is to have the most football money coming in possible. (See Ohio State, Michigan, and Florida as prime examples.) To the extent that there's "fear" on the part of the Big Ten, it's that they will be continuously fighting an uphill battle football-wise because so many of the top recruits come from the South (and specifically the SEC footprint). On the other hand, the Big Ten's footprint is probably the best pound-for-pound basketball recruiting territory of any power conference - see Chicago, Indiana, NY/NJ, Maryland/DC, etc. There is absolutely nothing structurally that prevents the Big Ten from competing at the highest level in basketball (regardless of how the ACC performs going forward), whereas there are very real and concrete demographic reasons why the Big Ten isn't getting the best football recruits.
At the same time, while football and basketball both require some type of combo of macro institutional strength and micro individual coaching, football prowess is much more dependent upon the institution (which is why how you invest is football matters so much more than any other sport), while basketball prowess is more dependent upon the individual coach. When push comes to shove, football recruits *generally* choose the institution over the coach, but basketball recruits *generally* choose the coach over the institution. (It's not 100% of the time since every individual kid is different in his decision-making, but that's how it generally bears out.) That's another reason why virtually no basketball program other the 6 blue bloods that I've mentioned really carry any weight in conference realignment - basketball is very much a coach-centric "What have you done for me lately?" sport, while football is all about long-term brand names that you can lock in and know will be able to provide value 10 or 20 years from now. Basketball branding simply doesn't get you very far unless you're a Duke/UNC/Kansas-type since it's a MUCH more fickle sport.
So, there's some real football fear on the part of the Big Ten - that's where the money is made and there are real demographic issues that are causing them to fall behind the SEC. There's absolutely NONE of that fear in basketball. If the Big Ten wanted some better basketball programs while still heading east and keeping with their academic requirements, they could have added Syracuse (at least back when they were still an AAU member) and Pitt in a heartbeat, but passed them over. Getting access to football recruits in New Jersey and Maryland was much more important in terms of the on-the-field/court aspect of these decisions (beyond TV markets and academics), with a side benefit that those are actually excellent basketball recruiting areas, to boot.
And look - I'm personally a hoops guy at heart. Frankly, I wish that the Big Ten did consider basketball more than it does in conference realignment (I actually argued for Syracuse as team #12 in the Big Ten back in the mid-2000s prior to anyone thinking about conference realignment), but that's just not how they're thinking. Basketball matters a little bit more to the Big Ten compared to other leagues because it provides BTN content, but football is still the massive golden goose by comparison (and it isn't even close).