With apologies to your favorite local neighborhood sports column guy, Jim Phillips’s job isn’t to inspire ACC fans from their supposed depths of despair.
To be honest, you’ve got to ask the question: why would your average ACC fan even have any despair?
There aren’t really ACC fans, per se; an “ACC fan” is a fan of their favorite school first, then the ACC somewhere after that.
Unless somebody’s suggesting that your favorite school is going to up and stop playing sports altogether if the ACC folds up, you’re going to follow your school wherever it goes.
And thing is, the ACC ain’t going anywhere, and it’s foolish to suggest that a conference that would be at worst a third wheel in a college sports universe with two superpowers is somehow all the sudden irrelevant.
The ACC, even in the worst-case scenario, isn’t going to ever be the AAC, the Mountain West, the Sun Belt.
It’s, again, at worst, the first among equals in the second tier of the former Power 5.
Phillips knows this. Your favorite local neighborhood sports column guy doesn’t, but he’s several pay grades below mattering in terms of whatever his opinion on the topic is in that respect.
Which is why when those guys want you to believe that Phillips owes it to “fans” to lay all his cards on the table about how the ACC shores up its finances relative to the new Power 2, it’s a sign that those guys don’t get it.
Phillips, or whoever would be in the ACC commissioner hot seat right now – Pete Rozelle, David Stern, the third coming of Jesus Christ – is walking myriad fine lines right now.
First off, there are the 15 college and university presidents and 15 ADs who each have their own fiefdoms to protect.
So, certainly, it seems logical to say off the top, hey, why not just adjust the revenue-distribution formula to give more money to the schools that have more success on the field? Wouldn’t that help out with the situation we’re in?
Yeah, sure, if you could do that by fiat, that would be logical.
Phillips isn’t king; he can’t do anything by fiat. He has to get those college and university presidents and ADs to sign on, and not just a majority, when you think about it politically.
Sure, then, to a next point, it’s being thrown out there, just go to ESPN and get them to renegotiate the contract to get us more money.
Reality there is, worst-case for ESPN is, they get ACC programming for 14 more years at half the going rate for the SEC and Big Ten.
It’s not like the ACC is going to go the way of the dinosaurs in terms of competition. The relative lack of resources will make it harder to compete with the SEC and Big Ten schools, but with the College Football Playoff on the verge of expanding to either eight or as many as 12 teams, the ACC is still going to get at least one bid, and some years maybe two or even three.
And in men’s basketball, even this past season, an off-year for the ACC, by all accounts, the conference had three schools in the Elite Eight and two in the Final Four.
If ESPN can continue to get ACC contests for half of what is being paid for the big boys, why would it pay more?
Just to be nice?
Ain’t happening.
Neither is it happening that Phillips can just persuade Notre Dame to become a full football member.
Notre Dame already gets a little more out of its current arrangement, getting a partial share from the ACC for basketball and the Olympic sports, and $22 million a year from NBC for football, than it would by being a full ACC member, and that is only going to become more pronounced when it comes to terms on a new deal with NBC after the current pact runs out in 2025.
Notre Dame doesn’t need the ACC; Notre Dame becoming a full football member is a non-starter.
It’s barely worth the time it takes to explain why it makes no sense to devote an iota of energy toward pursuing that angle.
It does make sense for the ACC to try to scour the landscape for a potential new member, but as Phillips made clear yesterday, it makes no sense to just expand for the sake of expanding.
And it’s not like there’s a bevy of potential fits for the ACC; all the good guys and girls already have dates to the prom.
Doesn’t mean you don’t try, but also doesn’t mean that you’re falling short of inspiring folks by acknowledging the reality.
That seems to be what your favorite column guy is getting at: OK, we all know this isn’t going to be easy, but why did Phillips have to be so brutally honest about it?
If you need somebody to rub Vaseline all over your heinie and tell you that it’s special and different from everyone else’s, Jim Phillips wasn’t your guy yesterday.
Me, I think he deserves some credit for telling it like it is.
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Chris Graham
