ACC commissioner fights for league, but conference’s durability awaits greatest test

In moments here on Monday at the start of the ACC’s annual preseason football kickoff event, Jim Phillips spoke with the kind of defiance and passion that has been absent at times during his three-year tenure. Yet these are fraught times in college athletics and especially in the ACC, which is fighting lawsuits and discontent, and Phillips acknowledged the challenge before him.

“Forceful moments,” he said at one point, “require forceful support and leadership.”

And so there he was during his regular state-of-the-conference address, speaking with an irregular — for him — kind of bravado. For a moment, this was not the Phillips of ACC media days past, the one whose talk of gated communities and healthy neighborhoods drew snickers and eye-rolls; the one who in 2021 entered into a hopeful yet doomed “Alliance” with the Big Ten and the Pac-12.

This, instead, was Phillips the fighter and the defender. He did not sound on Monday like someone with any intent to settle with Florida State and Clemson, the two schools that have sued the ACC. Phillips did not sound, either, like a commissioner content to allow his conference to drown in a sea of Big 12 propaganda and hype, which has bolstered the perception surrounding that league.

“We will fight to protect the ACC and our members for as long as it takes,” Phillips said, referencing the lawsuits that will decide the conference’s future. He called the legal cases “extremely damaging, disruptive and incredibly harmful to the league,” and described them as “overshadowing our student-athletes.”

He defended his predecessor, John Swofford, whom Phillips described as “decent and honorable,” and he offered a reminder, as Phillips has before, that Florida State and Clemson and every other ACC member “signed the Grant of Rights 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.”

In college sports these days, though, “deserve” doesn’t have much to do with anything.

Oregon State and Washington State certainly did not deserve to be left without a home, but that’s what happened last summer when the Pac-12 disintegrated. Fans in Oklahoma did not deserve to see the end — for the foreseeable future, at least — of the Oklahoma-Oklahoma State rivalry, but that’s what’s happening now that those schools are in separate conferences.

And, indeed, a conference whose revenue has increased by more than 200% over the past decade doesn’t deserve the perception that it’s a financial failure, either. But that’s the reality for the ACC — in part thanks to the ignorance that fuels discourse throughout social media, and in part because, yes, both the Big Ten and the SEC have grown even richer during the same time.

Since he became ACC Commissioner in 2021, Phillips has used his forum at football media days to advocate for his vision of college athletics. There was the talk, in years past, of maintaining a healthy neighborhood instead of a few gated communities. There was the insistence, a year ago, that college sports was never designed to be a different version of the pros.

And there was some of that Monday, but only in a much more muted kind of way. Indeed, the Big Ten and SEC have separated themselves. The ACC has clearly established itself as the third-best conference, financially, but the Big 12 lurks, and with a commissioner, Brett Yormark, who is unbothered by the norms and traditions of college sports as it was.

No, Yormark seems a perfect fit for college sports as it is — which is an enterprise that has more and more embraced its greed and unquenchable thirst for more. Even as he adopted the tone of a fighter on Monday, Phillips could not compete with Yormark’s craven showmanship a week earlier at his own conference’s media days, in Las Vegas, where he said his “top priority” was “growth and creating value for our member institutions.”

There is, apparently, nothing Yormark would reject if it meant more money.

Private equity? Sure.

Selling naming rights to the conference? Why not.

Advertising patches on jerseys and officials’ uniforms? You bet.

“I love what they recently did with on-field logos,” Yormark said, referring to the NCAA permitting schools to allow ads on fields. “I’ve been very vocal with the NCAA to push for making commercial patches permissible for officials’ uniforms, similar to what the NBA has done.”

Anything for a buck.

Contrast that to what Phillips said at this very event two years ago:

“We are not the professional ranks. This is not the NFL or NBA Light.”

He’d progressed enough on Monday to at least reference the more than $700 million the ACC generated during the 2022-23 fiscal year, and his assertion that the conference would remain the third-wealthiest in college sports. And it’s likely to happen that way, too, for as long as the conference can hold onto Florida State and Clemson and avoid defections.

But these are perilous times. It’s why Phillips said he’ll fight. Yet he remains an idealist, a proud academic in a college sports world more and more divorced from the academic mission of its member universities. And he’s fighting against people like Yormark, who have shown they don’t have much use for the ideals that used to guide college athletics, even if they were only a mirage.