The new ACC is here. Yet the conference’s identity, like its future, remains very unclear

The party commenced on the first day of July, the official start of what ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips called a “momentous occasion,” and it lasted into the night, with the Dallas skyline lit up in school colors to honor the conference’s newest member. Southern Methodist University, the private school in the heart of Texas, was now a part of a league born in North Carolina, and it called for a day of celebration.

There were gushing public statements from school officials and the mayor of Dallas, Eric Johnson, who described the Mustangs’ long-awaited arrival in the ACC as “a triumph for SMU.” There was a welcome party at a downtown Dallas sports bar, replete with SMU coaches and administrators and a set for the ESPN-backed ACC Network, there to broadcast the revelry live.

Mascots from around the ACC, and therefore now from around the country, descended upon Dallas for the festivities. Rameses from North Carolina. The Duke Blue Devil. Mr. Wuf from N.C. State. Otto the Orange, from Syracuse. And on and on, all welcomed to Texas by the costumed and humanoid version of Peruna, a two-legged horse in red high-tops and Mustangs gear.

For a day, at least, the ACC celebrated a new beginning and its newest member. Less than a full year after the conference’s presidents voted to approve a westward, Texas-to-California expansion — with N.C. State’s changed vote allowing it to pass by the narrowest possible margin — the league slowly began morphing into its new form, however long that configuration might last.

SMU became official on July 1. Cal and Stanford, meanwhile, will officially become ACC members on Aug. 2. A conference that began in Greensboro in 1953 with seven schools — four of them, at the time, confined to North Carolina’s Triangle region — has grown to include 17 full members spread across 11 states and three time zones.

A league with deep roots along Tobacco Road, in ways both figurative and close to literal, has now gone coast-to-coast, for better or worse.

In Dallas, the celebration earlier this month came with the feel of a carnival, or perhaps an all-day commercial designed to sell the perception that all is well in the ACC — that if these aren’t the best of times, they’re at least as good as any other. The backdrop of one of the broadcasts on the ACC Network, meanwhile, looked like something out of a pep rally, with cheerleaders and party-goers.

The day of arrival came with carefully-curated slogans: “The Mustangs are coming,” in the case of SMU-produced hype material, and “Greatness is Becoming Greater,” as went the title of a welcome video the ACC released.

At SMU, the day came with a sense of arrival for a school that had trudged through the college athletics wilderness for the past 35 years; an outcast whose repeated NCAA violations in a much different time devastated its football program.

For the ACC, the hope went that there’d be strength in numbers, regardless of the confines of geography. SMU was something of an institutional fit, at least, or close enough to one — same for Cal and Stanford, too. And so upon the official arrival of the first of three newcomers there was indeed cause to celebrate.

And then, the next morning, lawyers representing the conference showed up inside a Mecklenburg County courtroom.

Suddenly the Texas welcome party was over. Now it was July 2, and time for another procedural hearing in another legal case that will go a long way toward deciding the ACC’s future. The dramatic two-day swing reflected the uncertainty that has come to define the conference amid a time of near-constant upheaval throughout college athletics.

One day, the ACC in Dallas was reveling. And the next, fighting for its long-term survival in a courtroom some 1,000 miles away.

Months earlier, at the end of the ACC’s annual spring meetings in Amelia Island, Florida, Phillips, in his third year as the conference’s commissioner, had spoken of “the seismic shift” throughout college sports. It was a shift that was not some distant prospect but one “happening now,” he said, and he made his case for why the ACC would remain at the forefront of all the change.

“I don’t think anybody really knows where this thing is ultimately going to end,” Phillips said then. “But (I) certainly feel great about where the ACC is positioned, now and into the future, and we will continue to be a major contributor to the destination of where college athletics goes.”

Expansion was all part of the journey, and perhaps an inevitable part of it. Now that it has arrived, though, the ACC’s identity, like its future, has never been more muddled. A league named for its proximity to one coast will now stretch more than 2,500 miles to another, and it makes sense only in the context of a college athletics world that has become more and more nonsensical.

Growth, lawsuits, uncertainty

It is a league of juxtapositions and conflicts. That is part of the ACC’s new identity: that a conference celebrating its growth is trying to keep from shrinking; that one of its best years, defined by competition and money, came during one of its most challenging, off the field.

While the conference this summer is celebrating the arrival of three schools, two others, Florida State and Clemson, are trying to leave. Both have sued the ACC in an effort to find a way out of the Grant of Rights agreement that has held the league together in recent years. Speculation persists, grounded in reality or not, that others might want a way out, too.

Meanwhile, the ACC has never been richer off the field or stronger, overall, on it. The conference during the 2022-23 academic year generated $706 million — a record by almost $90 million. The league’s well-documented problem, and the basis for Florida State and Clemson’s lawsuits, is that the Big Ten and SEC continue to distance themselves financially from their peers.

Both of those conferences, for instance, crossed the $700 million threshold in revenue years ago — the Big Ten in 2018 and the SEC a year later. Thanks to their new television contracts — the SEC’s with ESPN and the Big Ten’s with Fox Sports and CBS — both conferences are about to become even wealthier, while the ACC languishes in a deal with ESPN that could stretch into 2036.

It has all created a perception that ACC schools are scrounging through their proverbial couch cushions, searching for spare millions. Two members are desperate enough to have sued the league. Phillips, more than once, has bemoaned the lawsuits and their contribution to the narrative that the ACC is inferior and ripe to be picked apart. It’s a perception that has only grown.

“It’s damaging to the league,” he said late last month, of those lawsuits. “It’s harmful to the league.”

Florida State and the ACC sued each other in December. Clemson and the ACC sued each other in March. There is no indication any of the four cases are anywhere close to a resolution. Meanwhile, the conference’s competitive results conflict with the social media doom that regularly surrounds the ACC.

Seven conference schools during the most recent academic year won NCAA championships. Over the past three years, the ACC has won 23 NCAA championships — most of any conference in the 28 sports the league sponsors. The league had 11 bowl-eligible football teams last year, most of any FBS conference. And three teams in the Elite Eight of the men’s NCAA Tournament, most of any conference. And one team each — both from N.C. State — in the men’s and women’s Final Four.

And ...

And does it matter? Will it matter, with the winners and losers in college sports judged more and more by numbers next to dollar signs, and less by those on scoreboards?

Conference realignment history

It is a league of defeated ideals and repeating history. That is part of the ACC’s new identity: that a conference that always attempted to remain above the fray and out of the muck rampant throughout college sports succumbed to the forces it has tried to resist; that in some ways, too, it has done its own to propel those forces.

Still, the conference has tried, at times, to uphold a certain kind of ideal. Its most recent attempt, and perhaps its last, began in August 2021. It was then, six months into Phillips’ tenure as ACC commissioner, when the ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 jointly announced what they described as a “historic alliance.”

The partnership was meant to “bring 41 world-class institutions together on a collaborative approach surrounding the future evolution of college athletics and scheduling,” went the press release. It came in response to the SEC’s announcement, earlier that summer, that it was expanding with the additions of Texas and Oklahoma, the two most prominent members of the Big 12.

The subtext of The Alliance was clear enough: three conferences that viewed themselves as peers and rivals of the SEC were coming together to bring sanity to college sports, and maybe even some leadership, too. The ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12 had agreed to work together to address the endless challenges facing college athletics, from deficiencies in health care for athletes to figuring out a more effective structure within the NCAA, and everything in between.

It sounded noble and, in hindsight, naive. The Alliance, which began without any binding contract, did not last a year. It ended, officially, in late June 2022, with the stunning news that UCLA and USC had agreed to leave the Pac-12 for the Big Ten. The ACC has forged on amid the discomforting metaphorical tick-tock of a doomsday clock ever since. A few weeks after The Alliance collapsed, Phillips advocated for a version of college sports that already seemed extinct.

He spoke of his desire “for college athletics to be a healthy neighborhood, not two or three gated communities.” He spoke of the need to balance the financial mission of college sports with the educational mission.

“We are not the professional ranks,” he said then, with a sense of passion, in July of 2022. “This is not the NFL or NBA-Lite. We all remain competitive with one another, but this is not and should not be a winner-take-all or a zero-sum structure.”

A year later, last summer, the Big Ten raided the Pac-12 again, this time for Oregon and Washington. The Big 12 swooped in and scavenged four other Pac-12 schools, which effectively put that conference out of business. The ACC’s presidents and chancellors spent most of last August debating whether to invite Cal and Stanford, and then SMU, before ultimately voting yes.

And that’s how the conference of Bill Friday, the former UNC System president and a staunch critic of the commercialism and money of big-time college sports, became a bicoastal league driven, like any other, with protecting and maximizing its television revenue. The Alliance feels these days like the quaint remnants of a distant time, and Friday like a figure from a different world.

In some ways, the ACC began the cycle that now threatens its existence when it pillaged the Big East in the mid-2000s through its addition of Louisville, in 2014, to replace Maryland. In another way, though, this is how it has always been. The ACC was born in 1953 when seven schools defected from the Southern Conference, seeking even bigger big-time college sports.

Bob Quincy, a columnist with the Charlotte News, put it like this in May 1953 upon the so-called “Seceding Seven” leaving behind the Southern Conference to form the ACC: “Reasons for the wholesale bolt are obvious enough. The institutions concerned intend to continue their quest of big-time football and felt the present conference hampers their stride.”

Not much has changed, except for the scale of the money involved and arguably the greed, too.

A basketball league when football rules all

It is a league of infighting and fighters and conflicting institutional goals. That is part of the ACC’s new identity, too: that it no longer has much of a shared identity; that the very steps it has taken to survive are the same ones that now threaten its existence.

For a long time, the league’s primary identity, in an athletics sense, was clear enough. It was the best basketball conference in the country, with coaches and players and venues — and a loyal, intense following — that was the envy of the rest of major college athletics. The money was good, too.

The league’s basketball prowess coincided with the rise of ESPN and regional sports broadcasts in the 1980s. By the late ’80s and throughout the 1990s, the ACC was the wealthiest conference in the country, on a per-school distribution basis, and that was why Florida State in 1990 accepted an invitation to join.

So began the ACC’s quest to become something greater in football. The league grew from nine to 12 schools. And then from 12 to 14 and a half, with Notre Dame’s half-in, half-out non-commitment in football. The state of college basketball declined. The importance of the ACC’s men’s basketball tournament, once among the most in-demand tickets in sports, faded away.

The league never quite fulfilled its promise in football. And now look at its makeup: a collection of smaller, elite private schools mixed in with relatively smaller flagship universities in North Carolina and Virginia, combined with a few larger land grant state schools, now merged with another private school, in Dallas, and two elite academic institutions in California.

The two schools most accomplished in football, FSU and Clemson, both want out. Meanwhile, one of the incoming members, SMU, was so desperate to join a so-called power league that it agreed to forfeit almost a decade’s worth of conference revenue to be a part of the ACC. Other schools, like UNC and Virginia, have not been particularly good at football, themselves, yet still may convince themselves of the need to chase Big Ten or SEC dollars.

The identities of the ACC’s chief rivals are clear enough. In the SEC, “it just means more,” as its slogan goes and, well, it’s difficult to argue. At least in football, the sport followed with a maniacal fervor throughout much of the conference’s geographic footprint. The Big Ten, meanwhile, is full of large state schools with enormous alumni bases that give that conference a sense of shared identity — and no shortage of viewers for networks consumed with football ratings.

The ACC has no such shared identity. Not anymore, at least. It used to be basketball and the fierce rivalries that long defined Tobacco Road. It was the ACC Tournament and the noise of intimate gyms. It was North Carolina, for better or worse, and what college athletics came to mean in this state because of the shared experience it offered.

Now the league is as large as it has ever been, and more disconnected, too. It has become a crossroads, an intersection for some schools that are happy to be here — happy to be anywhere, in the case of the newcomers — and others that appear desperate to leave.

If there’s a shared identity now it’s one of dysfunction, which perhaps is fitting given the rest of college athletics.