The rumors of the ACC’s demise have been greatly exaggerated, to hear commissioner Jim Phillips tell it, as he tried to massage his way through his annual State of the ACC address Wednesday at the 2022 ACC Kickoff.
Going on a thousand times, Phillips offered the line “evaluating all options” in reference to whatever the next steps the league will take to remain relevant in the college sports landscape.
“There’s been a lot of rumors and speculation the last few weeks, and I understand we all want answers and certainty. With that said, these decisions will impact our member institutions and student-athletes for years to come, and all options, all options, must be carefully evaluated,” said Phillips, whose address was delivered against a backdrop of dramatic change in college athletics for the second straight year.
Last year, Phillips offered his remarks the morning that the Houston Chronicle broke the story about the pending moves of Texas and Oklahoma from the Big 12 to the SEC, but the news was so fresh that the commish wasn’t even asked to dish on it in his post-speech Q&A with reporters.
Last month’s announcement that USC and UCLA are bolting the Pac-12 for the Big Ten certainly put Phillips and the ACC’s 15 presidents and athletics directors on notice.
The moves of Texas and Oklahoma to the SEC and USC and UCLA to the Big Ten have those two conferences on the verge of making the Power 5 a Power 2, with SEC and Big Ten members already receiving in the range of $25 million a year more from their conferences’ TV deals than ACC members get from theirs.
Projections have the SEC and Big Ten paying out in the range of $50 million to $55 million more per school than the ACC by the end of the decade.
The good news, and maybe also the bad news, here is that the ACC is at least not going anywhere, with the grants of media rights from the member schools to the league agreed to back in 2016 keeping the schools in place through the end of the ESPN TV deal in 2036.
That same TV deal, though, is acting as a millstone around their necks, locking the conference and the schools into what seemed to be a great deal in 2016, but not so much now.
“We’re looking at our TV contract,” Phillips said. “We’re in engagement daily, almost daily, with our partners at ESPN. I openly talk about ESPN because we are 50/50 partners on our network, and so they’re motivated, we’re motivated. We’ve come together to have some discussions about what would be the next iteration for the ACC. It doesn’t mean we’re going to make a move, it doesn’t mean we’re not going to make a move, but all options are on the table.”
That’s pretty much all Phillips can say at this point. There have been reports that the ACC has been in discussions with other schools, which Phillips stopped short of confirming, offering only that “we’ve had lots of really good discussions within the ACC, and I think you have to be thoughtful, you have to be smart, you have to be strategic.”
“Making a move just to make a move doesn’t make any sense,” Phillips said. “In the end, what is the value that ends up coming back to the conference if we were to expand? All of those things have to be under great scrutiny and dialogue and ultimately some kind of formation of what we think is best.”
If expansion isn’t “the only solution,” as Phillips said today, what are other possible solutions?
“We are really aligned to try to find some solutions to that revenue gap, but it can’t be at the expense of all the other things that we’re doing,” Phillips said. “So there’s, I think, a really good plan for us as we move ahead. Again, considering all of are our options. In these kinds of times you have to do that.”
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Chris Graham
