FERNANDINA BEACH, Fla. — Almost five months after he became the fifth commissioner in ACC history, Jim Phillips stood in front of a crowded hotel banquet room in Charlotte and emphasized the single priority most critical to the league’s future. It was Phillips’ first major public appearance in his new role, and he was speaking at the ACC’s annual preseason football kickoff.
“As I’ve stated since my first day as ACC commissioner,” Phillips said then, “football must be number one priority for us — for all of us: our schools, the league, ACC Network, our partners, coaches.” He spoke of the need “to ensure that ACC football has the mindset of 24/7, 365, and we’re working together to further elevate football in the ACC.
“We’re just getting started.”
Phillips maintained that the league’s overt prioritization of football would “not be at the expense of our other 26 sponsored sports,” and he argued that “ACC basketball, which we all love, has been and will continue to be the paradigm for excellence.” Yet his message was clear enough: the era of the ACC’s reliance on its basketball roots had long ended; football was king, or at least it had to be.
The contrast between the league’s basketball-rich past and its uncertain future in a football-first college athletics world was as clear as ever last week during the ACC’s annual spring meetings on Amelia Island, a posh enclave of tree-canopied streets and oceanfront resorts near Jacksonville, Florida. For four days inside the Ritz-Carlton, long home to these meetings, Phillips met with ACC coaches and athletic directors about challenges facing the league.
The future of football divisions, and scheduling, became one of the newsier topics. So, too, was talk of the steady drumbeat of larger problems surrounding college athletics, those related to pay-for-play under the guise of name, image and likeness deals; the rumblings of inducements that have sent football and basketball players rushing into the transfer portal. ACC men’s basketball coaches, meanwhile, spent a long time discussing something that once came automatically: respect.
A different world
Until the conference redeemed itself during the NCAA tournament, it plodded through a regular season in which it became something of a national punching bag. The perception of a “down” ACC took hold, and the league’s coaches last week discussed ideas about how to improve the conference’s image. It was a striking revelation, given the long-standing cachet of ACC basketball.
Last week, the conference invited Dan Gavitt, the NCAA’s senior vice president of basketball, to help its coaches understand the perception problem — “the narrative during the year,” as Phillips put it, that the league was weak. “We were trying to understand (that) a little bit,” Phillips said, acknowledging that the league’s relatively poor non-conference performance, early in the season, created a season-long perception that the ACC found difficult to shake until March.
There, in the NCAA tournament, league teams went 14-5 — the best record of any conference — and Duke and North Carolina played each other in a national semifinal for the first time. The Tar Heels’ 81-77 victory in New Orleans became an instant classic and, in the moment, a Duke-UNC game in the Final Four felt like an elixir for a sport in desperate need of a boost.
A little more than a month later, UNC’s memorable triumph against the Blue Devils was not old news, necessarily, but during the ACC’s spring meetings basketball again descended from its ever-narrowing perch. The conference’s 14 football coaches commanded attention, with about a dozen reporters following the majority of them down various hallways seeking interviews. The league’s basketball coaches, meanwhile, enjoyed a bit of relative anonymity.
Even Hubert Davis, the UNC coach who guided the Tar Heels to the national championship game in his first season, was not all that much in demand. He walked down a hallway last week, mostly alone, and reminisced of the first time he’d come to Amelia Island, back when Dean Smith had scheduled a UNC road game against Jacksonville in 1991. Davis was then a senior guard for the Tar Heels, and playing in what was arguably college basketball’s golden age.
It was a time of marketable stars who often stayed in college for four years; a time of coaches with instant name recognition, especially in the ACC. Throughout the league’s first five decades, into the 1990s and through the early 2000s, men’s basketball fueled the ACC’s economic engine. The league’s basketball television rights were long more valuable than those for football.
ACC basketball was such a commodity back then that when Florida State joined the conference in 1992, the conference’s financial “basketball advantage was going to outweigh the SEC’s football advantage,” Greg Phillips, then an FSU athletic department administrator, told the Florida Times-Union in a retrospective story published in 2001. A little more than 20 years later, the thought of ACC basketball commanding more television money than SEC football seems like something out of a different world.
The value of regular season college basketball broadcast rights hasn’t exactly plummeted as much as those for football have skyrocketed. As a result the ACC, which led its conference rivals in per-school revenue distribution in the mid-1990s, now generates hundreds of millions of dollars less than than the Big Ten and SEC.
The financial disparity will only grow once the Big Ten and SEC enter into new TV contracts in 2024, while the ACC is locked into its deal with ESPN through 2036. In the coming years, the Big Ten and SEC will likely both surpass the billion-dollar mark in revenue. The ACC continues to generate a record amount of revenue of its own, yet is falling further and further behind.
The league finds itself in a precarious spot. It’s a place in which its flagship sport, the one that for so long separated the ACC from its rivals, both financially and otherwise, carries less and less relevance, financial and otherwise. While college basketball remains must-see TV throughout the NCAA tournament, college football has emerged as a year-round enterprise; a “24/7, 365” priority, as Phillips put it.
A rapidly evolving landscape
ACC basketball, then, has been forced to rediscover its footing in a time of massive transformation. Not only have the financial dynamics of major college athletics evolved, but broader changes have coincided with the departures of two of the league’s longtime coaching luminaries. Former UNC coach Roy Williams retired a little more than a year ago. And after 42 years at Duke, Mike Krzyzewski coached his final game there about a month and a half ago.
The departures of Williams and Krzyzewski made for a “totally different” feeling during the basketball coaches’ meeting on Amelia Island last week, Georgia Tech coach Josh Pastner said. He described Williams and Krzyzewski as “Mount Rushmore guys,” and ones who’d for a long time guided the league’s decisions on everything from the ideal number of conference games to the ACC’s position on various issues affecting the sport.
“We’ve lost two gigantic voices in Coach K and Coach Williams,” Pastner said during a quiet moment in the hallway at the Ritz. Like most of his colleagues, he didn’t have to fight through a swarm of reporters after the men’s basketball meetings ended. “And we all know the best college basketball league in the history of college basketball has been the ACC.
“However, you can’t rely on just that historical figure of it. We’ve got to continue to make sure that we’re staying ahead of the curve. And as we see in college athletics, things are moving fast. Like, literally, so fast, day-by-day.
“So the pace, the speed, the motor you have has got to keep up with that.”
Things have moved so fast over the past two decades that ACC basketball has gone from a more valuable commodity than football to its equal to something much less now, at least financially. While the exact construct of the league’s television rights deal is unknown, football is believed to account for approximately 80 percent of it.
Overall, college basketball in recent years has faced an identity crisis while its best players have either left school after a season for the NBA or bypassed college altogether. The popularity of the transfer portal, meanwhile, has made the sport even more transient, and regular roster turnover has undoubtedly made college basketball more difficult to follow.
That may be changing some, though, thanks to name, image and likeness deals that could incentivize remaining in school. Armando Bacot and Caleb Love, both of whom played leading roles in UNC’s run to the Final Four, recently decided to return to school for another year. Without the promise of NIL deals, both likely would’ve found it easier to leave to begin their professional careers.
Mike Brey, the Notre Dame head coach, said last week that he has found it “really intriguing” to follow the effects of NIL, particularly when it comes to keeping players in college who otherwise would’ve likely departed. As a result, he said, college basketball has become “older, and better.”
For players on the margin of the NBA draft, Brey said, “instead of saying, ‘I’m getting old, I might as well go and at least go to Europe and start to make money,’ they go, ‘Well, wait a minute.’ And to the credit of their universities and their coaches, they say, ‘Well here’s what we can put together for you,’ and I can come back one more year.”
That has been the positive effect of NIL on college basketball, that it has helped slow the tide of players who’d long been in a rush to leave the sport to make money elsewhere. The downside, at least for coaches, is that NIL is one more thing they now have to account for in keeping a player happy. No longer is that solely about playing time or any other on-court dynamic of the game. Marketability matters, too.
Trying to find answers
Without Krzyzewski or Williams or Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim, who did not attend the ACC’s spring meetings, Brey last week embraced the chance to become something of a spokesman for the conference’s basketball coaches. He bemoaned the complaints he said he’d been hearing about NIL and other elements of a changing sport and, recently, he said he’d told younger coaches especially to stop complaining.
“Like, this is the world we’re in,” said Brey, who spoke without a filter with a group of reporters for more than 30 minutes. “Last time I checked, you make pretty good money. So everybody should shut up and adjust. You know, that’s just the world we’re in now. And, you know, I’m not in it as long as the Josh Pastners and some of these young guys. So good luck to y’all — I’ll be back in five years to see what’s up. Just remember, man, we’ve had it pretty good here.”
In nearly the same breath, Brey acknowledged that he’s on the “back nine” of his career.
“Maybe I’m on the back four, you know?” he said. But “players still want to win and be coached and work together and that still energizes me,” Brey continued, “and I think where I work, and the mission of our university, I just still think we’re getting guys that are coming for more of the right reasons. Now if that starts to change at Notre Dame, I’ll see you in Sarasota.
“I’ll buy you a beer. I’ll be hanging out down there.”
Brey and his colleagues last week first met with Gavitt, who detailed why the ACC, a 15-member conference in basketball, only received five bids to the NCAA tournament. Then the basketball coaches spent about 45 minutes with Phillips, the commissioner. That part of the meeting stood in contrast to others in recent years, when coaches had been more or less left to themselves to sort through various challenges confronting the league and their sport.
Phillips, a member of the NCAA’s Division I Transformation Committee, which is weighing the potential of overhauls on everything from athlete compensation to how college athletics is governed, attempted to provide a sense of calm amid a turbulent time. College basketball’s decline, relative to football’s rise, has given way to two existential questions that now surround the ACC: can the league enhance its football product fast enough? And, if it does, to what extent would that allow the conference to close the revenue gap with other leagues?
It wasn’t that long ago when ACC basketball was king, and perhaps the most lucrative commodity in college athletics. Now its basketball coaches, even the most visible ones, who could walk through the lobby of the Ritz mostly unbothered during the league’s spring meetings. There’s no Dean Smith these days; no Roy Williams or Mike Krzyzewski, either. The sport most responsible for the ACC’s growth from a Carolinas-centric entity to a $500 million enterprise faces no shortage of questions.
“You’ve got to adjust,” Brey said of the challenges surrounding the game. “You’ve got to figure it out. And really, our coaches in (the meetings)? It’s almost like, ‘Inform us. Educate us.’ Because this is the job, and now it’s changed.”
When Phillips entered the basketball coaches’ meeting last week Brey said he told him: “Jim, none of us have any answers. Please teach us. You’re on the (NCAA) transformation committee, you’re in the middle of all this stuff. ... Where should we go?
“And our guys asked great questions,” Brey said, “instead of a complaining session. Because I said it: If we’re going to chase our backsides for three hours, I’m going to the pool. Like, I’m not doing it.”
And so for three hours there was a strong dialogue, Brey said, about everything from the transfer portal to the ACC’s basketball perception problem. But there weren’t necessarily any easy answers, either. In a college athletics environment in which football has grown more and more powerful, the sport that gave rise to the ACC is fighting to retain its relevance, and find its way.
