In the span of about a week, in cities separated by about 600 miles, two of the most powerful leaders in college athletics offered contrasting worldviews in this summer of massive change and uncertainty. One of them espoused the supposed values of the traditional collegiate sports model; the other embraced and even welcomed the upheaval that has arrived and will undoubtedly persist.
Those competing viewpoints will shape the future of the ACC, now vulnerable at a time in college athletics in which money, particularly that derived from television rights contracts, carries more weight than ever. Indeed, the conference is in talks with ESPN about what can be done to enhance its own deal. And the ACC, perhaps for the first time, is considering an unequal revenue sharing model that would reward higher-performing schools, however that might be defined.
“I will continue to do what’s in the best interest of the ACC,” Jim Phillips, the league’s second-year commissioner, said earlier last month during its football media days in Charlotte. “But (I) will also strongly advocate for college athletics to be a healthy neighborhood, not two or three gated communities.”
Phillips spoke for more than 25 minutes during his opening address, and at times made a passionate argument for the preservation of a system that more and more resembles something like a game of Monopoly — rival conferences competing for the most valuable properties, all the while vying to be the last one or two leagues standing.
The SEC became the first major 12-team conference in the early 1990s, and then the creation of the Big 12 followed. The ACC, seeking a lucrative football championship game, went from nine to 12 schools in 2005 and, ever since, conferences have grown larger and more geographically loose, so much so that now UCLA and USC are set to leave the Pac-12 for the Big Ten.
The news of those schools’ impending departures from a conference built along the Pacific to one with deep Midwestern roots rocked college athletics in a way that nothing else quite had before. Expansion and realignment are not new, of course. But the Big Ten’s moves, which came about a year after the SEC decided to add Oklahoma and Texas, only cemented the perception, and emerging reality, that major college athletics is headed toward a two superconference model.
There’s the SEC and Big Ten, and their ever-expanding treasure chest of TV revenue. Then there’s everyone else.
Phillips arrived at his league’s media days, then, in a mode of defense. He defended the ACC’s accomplishments, and highlighted the record number of national championships it’d won in the past year, along with other competitive triumphs. Yet he also defended tradition, and in the process shared an idealistic version of college athletics whose existence is debatable, if not throughout history than certainly now.
“We need to be diligent and stay focused as we address the threats to what is the sporting envy of the world, the uniquely American combination of academic and athletic development that is college sports,” Phillips said, speaking in front of a ballroom full of reporters. He’d been talking for a while by then about the Big Ten and SEC without actually naming them.
Then Phillips arrived at the line he’d been waiting to deliver. He said it twice:
“Fundamentally we are all responsible for the greater good of the enterprise. Let me repeat that. We are all responsible for the greater good of the enterprise.”
“In times of great change, and that’s a fair description of the last 25, 15, 10 years and really the last 12 months, any new structure in the NCAA must serve many, not a select few,” he said. “... We are not the professional ranks. This is not the NFL- or NBA-lite. We all remain competitive with one another, but this is not and should not be a winner-take-all or a zero-sum structure.”
If Phillips meant to dissuade those in charge of other leagues, namely the Big Ten and SEC, from their pursuit of even more power, and more revenue, it didn’t seem to work. Less than a week later, Kevin Warren, the commissioner of the Big Ten, gave his own version of that conference’s state of the union. In the third sentence of a long soliloquy he referenced the “transformation, strength, power, boldness” of the league and, later, he promised that amid this changing landscape, “We will be innovative, we will be creative, we’ll be bold, we’ll be strong, we’ll be powerful.”
A Phillips-like approach and messaging, built on the virtues of the past, it was not. Soon a reporter asked Warren about his relationship with other so-called Power Five conference commissioners, and whether Warren foresaw those other three leagues — outside of the Big Ten and SEC — still remaining “part of the big picture” of major college football.
In his answer, Warren told a story. He went back in time, to his days as a law student at Notre Dame. On his drives from South Bend, Indiana, to Chicago, he said, he passed an old Sears and Roebuck building, viewable from the highway. Warren came to identify the building as a metaphor, a reminder of a bygone time when Sears and Roebuck was a giant of corporate America, when, as a child, it was “a happy day” when he’d pick his birthday presents out of a Sears catalog.
Now, Warren said, “those catalogs aren’t in existence anymore. Sears and Roebuck is not in existence anymore. So I think it’s important to put very creative, aggressive, bold minds in a room together. Fortunately, I have colleagues here in the Big Ten Conference to think about these ideas.
“I don’t want to be Sears and Roebuck.”
Unequal revenue distribution
A more appropriate analogy for the SEC and Big Ten these days might be Wal-Mart or, better yet, Amazon. They have proven to be the disruptors atop college athletics’ economic food chain, the big businesses that are moving into new territories, literally and figuratively, and either taking over or threatening to do so. It is troubling news for the mom-and-pops of the college sports world or, in this case, the ACC, a league whose roots, in the long term, are in danger of being torn apart.
So dire is the ACC’s predicament that Phillips conceded the conference is exploring the potential of an unequal revenue sharing model. Throughout its 69-year history the conference has distributed a mostly equal share of its revenue to members, with the exception of partial member Notre Dame. During the 2020-21 fiscal year, the league distributed an average of a little more than $36.1 million per school, with Notre Dame receiving a full share because it played football as an ACC member during the pandemic-altered 2020 season.
The ACC’s revenue distribution in 2021 was a record, as was the league’s total revenue of $578.3 million. And yet, judging from the panic of college football fans and others, one might be forgiven for thinking that the conference is destitute. The ACC’s problem is not so much rooted in a lack of money but in an unwinnable comparison to its rivals. The conference is generating more revenue than it ever has. Just not nearly as much as the SEC or Big Ten, both of which will extend their financial lead in the coming years after they negotiate new television contracts.
In the short term, there appears little for the ACC to do to keep its largest, most financially-demanding institutions happy. Phillips acknowledged the conference is in constant talks with ESPN, its television partner. Their agreement lasts through 2036, though, and there’s little to indicate that ESPN is willing to renegotiate the deal in a way that solves the ACC’s supposed financial dilemma.
Internally, then, an unequal revenue sharing plan might provide a solution. It didn’t work in the Big 12, though, and it’s fair to wonder how it would look in the ACC. Presumably, the league’s biggest “brands,” however they’re defined, would stand to gain the most. Perhaps a larger cut of conference revenue would be enough to appease Clemson or Florida State or, say, North Carolina. But what, then, of smaller schools that have succeeded in football despite a lack of ostentatious splurging?
Clemson, what with its football facility that’s home to a putt-putt course and lazy river, did not play for an ACC championship last season. Wake Forest did. The Demon Deacons in the league title game lost against Pittsburgh, whose home games, in an NFL stadium, are rarely full, and whose program lives in the shadows of a city devoted to its professional teams. Pat Narduzzi, the Pitt coach, was asked at ACC media day whether his program received the financial resources to be nationally competitive.
At first Narduzzi deflected — “I’m just trying to coach football,” he said in a way befitting of his gruff exterior — before perspective.
“I mean, put it this way,” he said, addressing a small crowd of reporters that surrounded him. “We all make different money in here, right? Doesn’t mean because you make less money you can’t be the better reporter, correct?”
To put it another way, Narduzzi said, “you can be an underpaid defensive coordinator and you’re not getting paid anything but you produce a top-five defense in the country. What does it really matter?”
The reality, though, is that revenue matters more than ever, and that television revenue seems to matter above all. Schools in major conferences make money off of sports in several ways — through ticket sales and booster club contributions and cuts from NCAA tournament appearances and bowl games. TV money, though, has now taken center stage.
It is what is driving Oklahoma and Texas from the Big 12 and into the SEC. It is what drove USC and UCLA to abandon its West Coast roots to pursue membership in the Big Ten. And, for the ACC, the lack of that revenue, relative to its two rivals, is now an albatross — the reason why “all options are on the table,” as Phillips recently said, to address the ACC’s financial disparity.
Embracing change
Money, Narduzzi was saying recently, “doesn’t make your kids happy, your coaches happy, your program happy. You know, we’d like to say we’re going to win without a doubt no matter what. That’s my philosophy.”
Dabo Swinney, the Clemson coach whose clumsy commentary about college athlete compensation has, at times, made him a target of ire, put things a slightly different way: “Bloom where you’re planted,” he said, when asked what he’d tell Clemson supporters longing for the riches of the SEC.
The ACC has not proven limiting for “little ol’ Clemson,” as Swinney sometimes referred to his program during its ascent to national contender. The school spent an ACC-high $16.8 million on its football coaching staff during the 2019-20 fiscal year, according to the Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database.
The database tracks college athletics spending, based on reports that schools file annually with the NCAA, and it provides about 15 years’ worth of spending data among public schools. One of the main takeaways, as it relates to the ACC: its members are just as financially committed to football as schools in other leagues, despite the perception that the ACC’s finances preclude higher spending. There are spending tiers, just as those tiers exist throughout the Power Five.
Florida State, for instance, spent $67.7 million on football in 2020 — more than any public school in the country. Clemson was second in the ACC in football spending, with a budget of almost $56 million. Both Clemson and Florida State more than quadrupled their football spending in the past 15 years. North Carolina tripled its football spending, from about $9.9 million in 2006 to more than $30 million in 2020, while Georgia Tech, Louisville and N.C. State more than doubled their spending.
Overall, the numbers tell a story of never-ending excess, especially as it relates to football spending. Athletic department spending increased by 135 percent between 2006 and 2020, but football expenses rose by 182 percent during the same span. Coaching salaries, meanwhile, increased at an even higher rate: 259 percent, over 14 years. Both UNC and N.C. State paid their football coaching staffs a total of about $2 million in 2006, which seemed then like a lot of money.
By 2020 that expense, for both schools, had increased five-fold.
Mack Brown, entering his fourth season of his second stint at UNC, lamented at ACC media day a trend he believes he helped begin. He was the first coach to make $5 million a year, after all, during his years at Texas, and he also elevated the salary of some of his assistants into a stratosphere that, then, was unparalleled. These days it’s barely newsworthy when a head coach makes $5 million a year, or when an assistant receives more than $1 million. It has become the norm.
Alabama paid its staff nearly $20 million in 2020. Two other schools eclipsed the $19 million mark.
In the ACC, football-only buildings have sprung up on or around campuses up and down the East Coast throughout the past decade while men who are judged on a dozen Saturdays a year have become multi-millionaires, their assistants joining them. But now Phillips, in his second year on the job, finds himself in a crisis, one where “all options are on the table” to feed an appetite for money that has never been more insatiable, despite the ever-increasing spending.
“If we take that path that it’s only going to be about football and basketball, that’s shame on all of us,” Phillips said, defending his belief in the traditional model. “It just is. I understand. I understand the criticism that comes with that, and that’s OK. I think it’s up for public debate and opinion about what’s right. I know, I understand about getting lapped (financially) I do. I get it.”
Soon enough Warren was offering his own perspective, and that of the Big Ten.
“We need to become comfortable in change,” he said. “We need to embrace change.”
It was enough to bring to mind the image of an old building along the side of a highway. And how if things were the same as always, that Sears would still be around, and Warren might still be receiving its catalogs in the mail.
