ACC’s football kickoff a throwback to what made the league great: Expensive lawyering

These football media days are a throwback to the time when college football wasn’t a year-round sport, when it took a gathering like this to mark the end of the summer and the start of talkin’ football.

Once, and not too long ago, it was as much a convention as a media event, with coaches and ADs and administrators all mingling with the media and each other, with golf and cocktail parties and the kind of informal face-to-face stuff no one has time for anymore.

By the time conference television networks came along and turned the entire operation into one big studio show, grist for the sanitized content mill, all of those ships had long sailed.

But at ACC Kickoff in Charlotte this week — and what was once a two-day event has bloated, along with the league, into a four-day marathon — it’s a throwback, with reminders everywhere of what made the ACC great.

Lawyers.

Oh, those glory days of the ACC, when legal titans roamed the ACC bar. Who can forget when Rick Barnes got a restraining order against Dean Smith, when Mike Krzyzewski filed SLAPP suits against the rest of the league, when Bobby Cremins yowled “haaabeyus cohpus” in Bronxese?

If only the ACC really was a league of litigators, legal titans who roamed not only the hardwood but the mahogany rail of the courtroom. There would be no revenue gap then. Cal and Stanford’s law schools might have been a net positive in expansion, instead of their athletic programs becoming a competitive anchor dragging the ACC down.

Alas.

While the ACC keeps sending teams to the Final Four with the same regularity as the mailman delivers, football is still recovering from Florida State’s CFP snub. N.C. State athletic director Boo Corrigan led a selection committee that found a way to omit an undefeated team, the inside job that severed the last thin ties of decorum binding Florida State to the ACC.

But the Seminoles haven’t come up with an exit plan yet, so the big ACC showcase kicked off Monday with none other than Florida State, embroiled in multiple lawsuits against the ACC, all of which it would be catastrophic for the Seminoles to actually win, since if they argued their way out of the ACC, they’d be the dog that caught the car, with nowhere to go.

Then again, that was never why FSU sued the ACC. It was just to pacify the message–board boosters who were convinced the Seminoles deserved better. (They do not.) Private equity? Why not. Florida State spends more than any other ACC public school with less to show for it.

Florida State is not alone, though. Clemson, currently debating the true meaning of the word “is” with the ACC in courtrooms in two different states, comes along Thursday, and watching Dabo Swinney dodge questions about the lawsuits will be must-see TV. Live on the ACC Network, of course.

You, an outsider, a simpleton, might say that all of this legal wrangling makes the ACC look weak, and its future look uncertain. The Big 12 and SEC commissioners took their wink-wink-nudge-nudge shots at the league during their Real Househusbands of the Power Four confessionals over the past few weeks.

But real ACC insiders know, since the days when Everett Case was the first to make celebratory confetti out of winning judicial orders and Frank McGuire started recruiting paralegals from New York, the ACC has always been known for big-time college athletics’ finest combination of competitive excellence and legal theatrics.

If you can’t Accomplish Greatness (tm) on the football field, there’s always the courtroom.

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