WUNC | By Mitchell Northam
PublishedJuly 22, 2024 at 4:28 PM EDT
Much has changed in the landscape of college athletics since Jim Phillips became the commissioner of the Atlantic Coast Conference four years ago.
Among those shifts and developments have been the introduction of NIL, allowing college athletes to earn money from their name, image and likeness. It’s now legal to gamble on sports in 38 states, including North Carolina, where the ACC was formed 71 years ago and still hosts its headquarters today. And conference realignment — driven by television revenue from football — have made teams look for greener pastures. Since Texas and Oklahoma accepted invitations to join the Southeastern Conference in July 2021, dozens of schools have changed athletic conferences and the Pac-12 no longer exists. The ACC took in two Pac-12 refugees — Cal and Stanford, along with Southern Methodist University — to expand the league to 17 football-playing members in a conference footprint that now stretches from coast to coast.
The ACC has not been immune to conference realignment. Florida State and Clemson have each separately sued the league in the past seven months. The Seminoles filed first last December, and the then the Tigers brought forth litigation in March. The league responded to both schools with countersuits to enforce their previous agreements.
Speaking on Monday at the Hilton in Uptown Charlotte at ACC Kickoff – the conference’s annual media days for football – Phillips spoke with force about the lawsuits and made one thing crystal clear: the ACC will not throw in the towel on this legal battle.
“We will fight to protect the ACC and our members for as long as it takes,” Phillips said. “We are confident in this league and that it will remain a premier conference in college athletics for the long-term future. These disputes continue to be damaging, disruptive and incredibly harmful to the league.”
By filing lawsuits against the ACC, Clemson and Florida State have loudly voiced their desire and intentions to leave the conference. But standing in their way – the thing they are trying to wriggle out of by way of litigation – is an imposing grant-of-rights that each member school signed and agreed to in 2013 that gives the ACC control of media rights for the duration of a TV deal with ESPN that runs through 2036. The schools agreed to the grant-of-rights once more before the ACC Network launched in 2019, which the ACC and ESPN are 50-50 partners in.
And so, the way things currently stand, even if Clemson and Florida State paid a nine-figure exit fee to leave the ACC, the conference would still own the media rights for the Tigers and Seminoles for the next decade-plus, meaning that Clemson and Florida State wouldn’t be able to profit off their games being on television.
Clemson and Florida State are hoping to find a loophole through all this in court, but the ACC is standing its ground.
“Forceful moments deserve forceful support and leadership,” Phillips said. “This is a really important time for the conference. Either you believe in what has been signed or you don't. We are going to do everything we can to protect and to for fight the league… This conference is bigger than any one school, or schools.”
Phillips also vigorously defended his predecessor, John Swofford, who served as the ACC Commissioner from 1997 to 2021 and led the charge in launching the ACC Network and locking down a long-term deal with ESPN.
“John Swofford is a decent and honorable man and is widely respected in our industry. He led this conference with a steady hand for over two decades,” Phillips said. “The fact is that every member of this conference willingly signed the grant-of-rights and unanimously – and quite frankly, eagerly – agreed to our current television contract and the launch of the ACC Network. The ACC — our collective membership and conference office — deserves better.”
Clemson and Florida State want out because they feel like they are falling behind programs in the SEC and the Big Ten in a college athletics arms race. Fueling it is TV revenue from football. For the 2022-23 athletic season, the ACC distributed $44.8 million to each of its 14 football-playing members. Meanwhile, the SEC paid out its members $51.3 million and Big Ten schools got $60.3 million. That puts the ACC in third place by a sizable margin.
As long as that gap in revenue exists between the ACC and those other two leagues, it’s unlikely that Clemson and Florida State will change their minds on leaving. If there is an end in sight for litigation between the two schools and the ACC, it’s hard to see.
“We've had six months of disruption. I think we've handled it incredibly well,” Phillips said. “There isn't a day that doesn't go by that I don't spend some time on the legal cases. I don't think that's going to change.”
Clemson and Florida State are the only two ACC football programs to win national championships in the past two decades. The two schools – along with UNC-Chapel Hill – voted against the ACC adding Stanford, Cal and SMU last fall.
In a statement last fall, the UNC Board of Trustees said of the expansion: “The travel distances for routine in-conference competitive play are too great for this arrangement to make sense… The economics of this newly imagined transcontinental conference do not sufficiently address the income disparity ACC members face.”
Since the ACC officially welcomed those three new members, the UNC System Board of Governors gave itself additional power in conference realignment, making it a requirement that any of North Carolina’s public universities – which include ACC members UNC-Chapel Hill and N.C. State – get permission from the BOG before changing athletic conferences.
