CHARLOTTE, N.C. — College football is out of control, the economics involved becoming so extraordinary that football’s gravitational force is warping the very boundaries of college sports in which it exists. As the ACC reckons with where it fits in this new landscape, at least one coach has come to regret his role in how things got this way.
Mack Brown, at Texas, pushed the envelope as far as it could be pushed, and … it worked! Brown indeed delivered the Longhorns their long-sought national title, earning the ring he wore Thursday at ACC Kickoff, the one day a year he brings out that bling since returning to Chapel Hill.
But as North Carolina and the ACC may soon face a choice between chasing the Big Ten and SEC into a world of semi-professionalism or sticking to the principles on which the ACC was founded almost 70 years ago and being left behind, Brown now finds himself losing the same football power struggle he once won.
“I look back, I was the first one to get paid $5 million,” Brown told The News & Observer on Thursday. “I didn’t ask for it. But I wish I hadn’t taken it. You have to, at the time, because you don’t know what’s the next step. I paid (assistant coach) Will Muschamp $900,000 before anybody else did and that was to keep him from going to some other schools as a head coach. So I am part of the problem.
“As I look back at it now, I’m not proud of it. It was probably going to get there anyway. But I was absolutely part of it as I look back. I was trying to compete. Trying to do what was best. Now I’m not sure it’s the healthiest.”
The arms race Brown was fully engaged in at Texas has only accelerated since, to levels neither he nor anyone else could have envisioned. A year ago, he was shocked when Oklahoma and Texas joined the SEC, which went against everything he knew and had been told during his time in Austin.
And this entire two-day ACC football event has been conducted under the cloud of uncertainty created by UCLA and USC jumping to the Big Ten, the further consolidation of power in the two most financially secure conferences, all driven by football at the expense of every other consideration.
There’s no looking around to figure out who did this. Brown’s mandate when he left North Carolina for Texas was to be the guy who finally used that school’s nearly limitless resources to propel it to football success after years of rank underachievement. The arms race was already under way, and had been for years, but Brown’s time at Texas was unquestionably an accelerant.
Was there any other way, though? If it wasn’t Brown, it would have been someone else. This has been brewing for years, since football overtook basketball as the main driver of television contracts. The whole point of the ACC’s first wave of expansion 20 years ago was to add football schools to avoid becoming a boutique basketball conference.
Yet here the ACC is, two decades later, having fallen behind in football and at risk of becoming a boutique basketball conference — if it even exists at all.
“To compete in football, the ACC’s going to have to step up,” Brown said. “Because we’re going to recruit against the Big Ten and against the SEC. Unless you’re affording your student-athletes the same opportunities that those two are, they’re not going to come. And then we’re not going to be competitive on a national level in football, and we have to be competitive or it doesn’t work for fans and it doesn’t work for TV.”
It was all about money then and it’s even more about money now, because the consequences of falling farther behind are too grim to think about. The ACC is being swept along by a river of money, trying to thrash its way to the surface as the Big Ten and the SEC float along — Brown and all his ACC colleagues now at the mercy of the same football forces he helped unleash.
