RALEIGH, N.C. — As the ACC gathers for what figures to be the most awkward football kickoff on record, the phrase “revenue gap” will hang over these media days like a horror movie villain. And like Jason Vorhees or Freddy Krueger, the infamous revenue gap keeps popping up in sequels every time it’s supposed to be dead.
Five years ago, then-ACC commissioner John Swofford predicted it would “narrow considerably once we get the network up and running.” This spring, current ACC commissioner Jim Phillips said “we want to address that and close that as often and as quickly as we can.” The next commissioner, whomever and whenever that may be, may still be trying to stab a stake in its heart.
It all sounds very ominous, but “revenue gap” is just a polite way of saying “the SEC and Big Ten have more money than us and are about to have way more money than us.” Kind of like “still exploring our options” is a polite way of saying “deciding whether to move the ACC office from Greensboro to Charlotte has taken 12 months when it should have taken no more than 12 weeks.”
There’s no question that the revenue gap is real. The ACC payout to each school is more than $25 million less than what the Big Ten and SEC pay their schools, the product of more lucrative rights deals, longer-running conference networks and — there’s no getting around this — better football products, the invisible hand guiding the destiny of college athletics.
There’s an alternate reality where Miami, Virginia Tech and Florida State are all still competing for national titles in football and the ACC is still on even footing with the Big Ten and SEC. This ain’t it. Their lack of football success has been crippling. It’s not a stretch to say the ACC revenue gap, as it exists now, is as much the fault of the collapse of Miami football into self-parody as anything or anyone.
Then again, it’s also not a stretch to ask whether it really matters. The ACC has had a team in the College Football Playoff every year except last season, and has claimed two of seven titles, both by Clemson. The ACC has accounted for three of the past seven national champions in men’s basketball and seven of the past 28 Final Four teams, and has had a team in the Women’s Final Four in six of the last eight years, with Notre Dame winning the title in 2018.
In this season’s Director’s Cup, which measures success across all sports, the ACC had 10 of the top 50 teams with North Carolina and Notre Dame both in the top 10. The ACC’s average finish was 41.7, only a hair behind the Big Ten (39.6) and a little farther behind the SEC (29.0). The ACC actually ends up between the two at 36.9 if you exclude 109th-ranked Boston College, which would have ranked eighth in the Ivy League or third in the Big South behind North Carolina A&T and Campbell.
Other than BC, that doesn’t seem to indicate a great competitive disadvantage. It’s fair to ask whether the raw numbers matter — whether “how much” matters as much as “having enough” — and, so far, the ACC Network has been able to generate enough revenue to keep the ACC on an equal competitive footing, if not a financial one.
The fear, of course, is that as that gap widens — with the SEC adding Oklahoma and Texas and the Big Ten going coast-to-coast to add UCLA and USC — that the financial inequities spill over onto the field of play, that the incremental advantages of being able to pay more for coaches and trainers and ex-coach consultants, of having flashier facilities and bigger administrative budgets, will eventually translate into a competitive advantage.
Even the mere perception of that advantage, real or not, could have a massive impact on recruiting. And as players get an increasing chunk of the revenue they generate — and name, image and likeness (NIL) is just the beginning — there’s going to have to be more money to pay them.
But there’s a counterpoint to that as well. At a certain point, there’s only so much money you can pump into this system before going far beyond the point of diminishing returns. How many million-dollar strength coaches do you need? How many flat-screen TVs and massage chairs can be crammed into a locker room? Does any of that actually contribute to winning? Or does it just line the pockets of everyone but the athletes, from athletic administrators to friendly contractors?
And as the numbers get eye-poppingly bigger, when will the academic side of some of these universities demand a cut of that big payday? Universities have been subsidizing athletics out of their general budgets for decades, through scholarships if not outright payouts, and that pendulum of academic resentment will swing back at some point as the cash rolls in.
The revenue gap might narrow not because the ACC gets more, but because athletic departments in the Big Ten and SEC — OK, probably not the SEC — end up getting less of what they thought they were going to get.
There will be no answers, either way, in Charlotte this week, only the lingering, barely perceived fear of that fabled spectre lurking down the hallways and behind the doors of conference rooms. The revenue gap, like any good franchise villain, isn’t going away anytime soon.
