CHARLOTTE, N.C. — In a small conference room on the second floor of a Hilton Hotel on Monday, Jim Phillips escapes, at least temporarily, from the bustle of his league’s opening day media day.
Sitting at the head of the table, Phillips, the ACC commissioner, gestures to the four loose pages in front of him that confirm his lecture’s superlatives.
For example, seven different ACC schools won NCAA team championships this year, in addition to the 16 they won the previous two years. The three-year total of 23 titles leads all conferences. The ACC also leads all power conferences in several rankings, including U.S. News & World Report, NCAA graduation rates and NCAA academic performance figures.
The list goes on. The league generated a record $700 million in revenue last year and distributed $45 million to each of its members, the third-most in the country. Finally, the ACC is home to two of the three active head football coaches to win a national championship and has won the second-most CFP titles of any conference over the past decade.
For Phillips, those wondering whether the ACC is the third-best conference in college sports behind the SEC and Big Ten need look no further than the list before him.
“We’re not chasing third place. Whatever the metric (CFP appearances, national championships, having our own network, revenue generation, academic prowess), I’m comfortable with where the ACC is: top three,” he told Yahoo Sports in an interview Monday.
Shortly before that, Phillips, often mild-mannered and generally uncontroversial, had opened the four-day event in Charlotte with an impassioned, and sometimes brash, hour-long speech on the state of the ACC.
He blasted Florida State and Clemson for their “disruptive and harmful” attempt to leave the league by pursuing their own conference, argued that the ACC is committed to fighting the schools in court “for as long as it takes” and passionately defended former commissioner John Swofford, the target of public attacks over a long-term television contract with ESPN that has some members agitated as other league media deals soar.
He did something else, too. Without any subtlety, he painted a clear picture of the hierarchy in college sports: the SEC, the Big Ten and… the ACC.
“The ACC is one of the top three conferences in terms of overall revenue generated and distributed,” he said, “and we fully expect that to continue and grow.”
Two words have remained virtually inaudible here in Charlotte: Big 12.
And yet Phillips’ public salvos seemed clearly aimed at that goal. other conference, some 13 days after its commissioner, Brett Yormark, kicked off his own media day in Las Vegas by saying his league had “solidified itself as one of the top three conferences in America.”
While the Big 12 has publicly explored issues of private equity and conference naming rights, the ACC has been exploring those issues privately, Phillips said. “Simply because we haven’t talked about it publicly,” he began before trailing off. “Shame on anyone who thinks we haven’t worked through these and other issues privately and confidentially.”
Finding untapped revenue streams is a top priority for the ACC and Big 12, each of which has fallen behind the SEC and Big Ten. Gaps in television distribution — a major reason for FSU and Clemson’s exit attempts — could amount to as much as $30 million per school over the next two years.
But help is on the way, Phillips says. The league is using its College Football Playoff distribution and the extra ESPN money from expansion ($600 million) to create what it calls a “success initiative” fund that awards units to individual schools based on meeting criteria, including qualifying for a bowl game, finishing in the top 25 and participating in and advancing through the CFP.
An ACC team could make up to $25 million, Phillips said. That’s money that helps close the gap, he said. Indeed, the initiative will help “close the gap,” Miami athletic director Dan Radakovich said. While more money doesn’t always lead to more success, there is a correlation between success and resources, North Carolina athletic director Bubba Cunningham told Yahoo Sports last spring. And in the new era of college sports, “it’s our job to be successful in football,” he added.
But that won’t completely close the gap, Florida State athletic director Michael Alford said.
Because of the new CFP distribution model (58% of the money goes to the SEC and Big Ten), ACC teams will be about $40 million behind schools in those two conferences.
“That’s why our conference success initiatives are so important. It’s important to invest in being able to capitalize and close that gap as best we can,” Alford told Yahoo earlier this year, “but the CFP’s move away from performance-based incentives has made that gap almost impossible for individual programs to close.”
Florida State officials have made more noise than any other ACC program in publicly criticizing their own conference. Engaged in a lawsuit to get out of a franchise rights agreement 12 years before it expires, the Seminoles are using legal methods to expose ACC contracts normally kept private.
The infighting continues throughout the league as a whole, even during these media days. After all, Florida State head coach Mike Norvell and players attended Monday’s opening day alongside those from SMU, the same SMU that joined the conference this year despite FSU and others (Clemson and North Carolina) voting against expansion last August.
It’s a strange dynamic at play, a sort of dysfunctional family that Phillips tries to tame as best he can.
“We’ve had six months of disruption. I think we’ve handled it incredibly,” Phillips said. “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t spend time on the Clemson and FSU lawsuits. And I don’t think that’s going to change.”
Could this be possible? Would the ACC agree to go back to League 2 if, for example, they had nowhere else to go?
“The idea is that they’re in the league. That’s what we’re working toward with this suit, that they’re part of our league,” Phillips said.
Clemson and FSU students believe that if they are legally freed from ACC rights, there will be takers.
But it’s unlikely that any SEC or Big Ten school would agree to cut its television coverage to add a school. For the SEC, that’s especially true given its footprint: The league already has a home base in South Carolina and Florida.
For the Big Ten and SEC to grow, they would likely need more money from their television partners — a lot more money (over $100 million per year). That’s primarily Fox for the Big Ten and ESPN for the SEC.
Could the ACC appease its two agitated members by giving them more money? Maybe.
There’s another untapped revenue stream: the ESPN contract itself. While it’s widely believed that the deal runs through 2036, that’s not the case. The deal ends in 2027.
ESPN is expected to decide on its nine-year extension by February. The ACC and ESPN are in the midst of negotiations over the extension, discussions that Phillips described as “positive and productive.”
Could the network increase the value of the deal?
“We’re talking about it,” Phillips said.
But enough of that, the commissioner said. There will soon be football to play — one of the most tense seasons in ACC history. For the ACC and Big 12, the pressure is on to advance as many teams as possible into the expanded 12-team College Football Playoff beyond the automatic bids their champions receive.
The two conferences added a total of seven new teams, and now span nearly coast to coast.
Nearly five weeks before the season begins, the political wrangling over CFP bids has begun. A banner greeted media day attendees in the Hilton lobby Monday with another of Phillips’ superlatives: “The ACC,” it noted, “has the toughest nonconference schedule in the country.”
A usual message for a league? Perhaps. But we are living in unusual times.