What’s next for ACC as it enters a new season amid constant change in college sports?

In each of the past three years, the ACC’s annual spring meetings ended with familiar refrains and messaging — of hope; of strength; of maintaining its place in the hierarchy of college athletics — only for massive change to imperil the conference in the months to follow. It has become a rite of summer in college sports, one that has the ACC fighting for its long term survival and relevance.

Before everything changed, the league’s status as a power conference appeared secure. Its annual May meetings, at an Amelia Island Ritz-Carlton with endless views of sand dunes and crashing waves, came and went without all that much stress. It wasn’t all that long ago when the most pressing issue at those meetings was the prospect of eliminating football divisions.

And before that, the impending arrival of the ACC Network. Then came the dominoes.

The summer of 2021 brought the news that Oklahoma and Texas would leave the Big 12 to join the SEC. The summer of 2022 brought the news that UCLA and USC would abandon more than 90 years of history with the Pac-12 to join the Big Ten. The summer of 2023 brought the news that Washington and Oregon would do the same.

Those moves, last summer, became official months after the revelation that seven schools (the so-called “Magnificent Seven”) were exploring a potential exit from the ACC. By the end of last summer, the Pac-12 was all but dead and the ACC, in a move that suggested it felt like it had to do something, had decided to add Cal, Stanford and SMU.

Anyone who might have expected a reprieve from the madness was soon proven naive. Florida State sued the ACC late last December, seeking an exit from the conference’s Grant of Rights agreement. Clemson filed a similar lawsuit in March. The Florida state attorney general sued the ACC in April, seeking to make public the league’s television contract with ESPN.

And then everyone in the conference came together a couple weeks ago at the Ritz for another round of spring meetings. Athletics directors. Football and men’s and women’s basketball coaches. Administrators. One big dysfunctional family, especially given the representation of two schools trying to sue their way out of the conference, and three others who just accepted invitations to join.

Charlie Baker, the NCAA President, attended the first day to provide a briefing of the impending settlement — now official — that would require schools to pay athletes directly. And as usual, the conference invited guests throughout the college athletics industry. Some of those guests began trickling toward a reception on the first night of the ACC’s spring meetings, past a set of closed doors where the league’s television committee was meeting on the other side.

As they walked past, one older man turned to another.

“Aren’t you glad you’re not in those rooms,” he said, “trying to figure out those problems?”

Problems? We’ve got a few

The ACC is faced with several problems these days, some real and others mostly imagined and all of them the result of a phenomenon that is not unique to major college sports, but that the industry has come to embody. It is difficult if not impossible, after all, to name another American enterprise that has grown as wealthy, while maintaining that its considerable wealth just isn’t enough.

The setting of the conference’s spring meetings again spoke to the disreality. Consider the environment: a tranquil coastal island along the Georgia-Florida border; a resort with bowls of salt scrub hand massage in the lobby bathrooms and luxury cars lining the circular driveway out front; a place of comical indulgence and opulence.

People come to Amelia Island to escape. It’s a place where anyone should have to work hard to feel anxious. And yet anxiety pervaded the ACC’s recent visit there, all of it the consequence of the endless chase of revenue and the ramifications of not having enough of it — or at least not as much as the two wealthiest conferences in the country.

The ACC is the third-wealthiest, behind the Big Ten and SEC. Those three leagues, along with the Big 12 and even the Pac-12, before its destruction, combined in recent years to generate billions of dollars in revenue. Soon enough, though, the Big Ten and SEC will both cross the billion dollar mark on their own, and already they’ve essentially transformed the Power Five into a Power Two.

The ACC, meanwhile, continues to set revenue records of its own. It generated $706.6 million during the 2022-23 fiscal year, according to tax documents it released last week, and over the past 20 years its revenue has increased by almost 550%. But the SEC has made more, and the Big Ten even more than that. The financial gap between those leagues and the ACC will grow wider.

And so the reason for all the panic, and lawsuits. There was a time, years ago, when barely any media members covered the league’s proceedings at the Ritz. This year, the national college football media came out in force, all gathered for a spectacle that never quite materialized.

It wasn’t as though the delegates representing FSU and Clemson expressed their discontent, at least not publicly. Nobody was asked to leave any meetings. There were no showdowns — none all too visible, anyway — among the warring factions of the conference, between those schools that might seek to destroy it in pursuit of greater riches and others motivated to keep the ACC together.

But there was an undercurrent of tension and distrust. A familiar sense of unease.

The obvious lingering question, amid all this change, of what comes next.

“Well the good news is we’re experienced” in matters of uncertainty, said Nina King, the Duke athletics director. “Because last year when we sat here, we were talking about the Magnificent Seven. And I feel like each spring meeting (the question will be) what are we going to deal with — what disruption?”

College sports’ annual upheaval

The disruption this year, like last, arrived early. In 2023, ACC spring meetings began with the report, from national college football reporter Brett McMurphy, that seven league schools had convened to evaluate the strength of the Grant of Rights. This year, the most important ACC news on the first day of meetings happened not inside the Ritz but in Chapel Hill.

It was there, during a UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees meeting, where university leaders took aim at Bubba Cunningham, the UNC athletics director, and called into question his management of the department. Some of those trustees expressed frustration over what they described as a lack of communication with Cunningham about athletics finances.

One trustee, Jennifer Halsey Evans, spoke of a projected $100 million deficit in the coming years, “with no plan to address that, to mitigate that.” She said during the meeting that “there are real issues here, a real concern that one of our most valuable assets, and something that really generates revenue, is not being managed properly.”

The commentary spread online, where anything remotely related to college athletics and money and discontent — rooted in reality or not — becomes fodder for rumors and narratives. Suddenly another had emerged: that the trustees’ ire was a sign of major money problems in athletics at UNC; that Cunningham’s job was at risk; that UNC, in such a dire financial predicament, would be next to sue the ACC.

Cunningham during a brief interview at the end of the first day of spring meetings declined comment. Two days later, Jim Phillips, the ACC Commissioner, tried to answer a question about the latest league member to suggest they didn’t have enough money for sports — regardless of UNC’s considerable athletics success throughout Cunningham’s tenure, and before it.

“I don’t know what’s true and what’s not,” Phillips said, in part, in his response.

And was he concerned that UNC could be the next to try to sue itself out of the league?

“I can’t get into the local dynamics,” Phillips said, repeating an earlier statement that the trustees’ complaints had been a part of “campus discussions and campus politics.”

“We stay close,” he said. “Nobody’s reached out to me. Nobody’s reached out to the conference office on that, relative to the board (of directors) or anybody else.”

Nonetheless, a narrative had taken hold. Another ACC school, so went the perception, had started to make its move. And not just any ACC school, but one of the league’s pillars.

Separating fact from fiction

Was it true? And did it matter whether it was true?

Phillips was attempting to answer a question about the significance of the UNC trustees’ remarks when he said he didn’t know what was true and what’s not. He could have been talking about a lot of things throughout his industry.

The day after the ACC’s spring meetings ended, Cunningham was supposed to appear at another UNC trustees meeting to answer questions, and explain his department’s alleged shortfall. The meeting never happened, though, after a local attorney, David McKenzie, filed a complaint in Orange County court alleging that the trustees’ intent to discuss athletics in closed session would violate state open records law.

And so ended, for now, the latest threat to the ACC’s existence. There have been several over the past six months: FSU’s lawsuit. Clemson’s. The one from Ashley Moody, the Florida attorney general, who is seeking to make the ESPN contract a public record. (In a legal filing Wednesday, the Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC joined the ACC in fighting to keep that record confidential.)

The yet-to-be-resolved episode at UNC became the latest turn in the ACC’s new reality, one replete with a blurred line between fact and fiction and no shortage of narratives. Perhaps the trustees’ grievances reflected a deeper agenda to lay the groundwork to try to leave the conference sooner than later. Perhaps, instead, they were the result of simmering frustration over a perceived lack of communication with Cunningham. Perhaps there were other motives, entirely.

Meanwhile, the aggregators and social media commenters soon enough moved on to the next shiny nugget, however baseless or not. This one suggested that Utah, which just left the Pac-12 for the Big 12, might be interested in leaving the Big 12 for the ACC. The origin of the “report,” if it could be called such a thing, came from a social media post last week from Dick Weiss, who earned acclaim for his college basketball coverage during a longtime career with the New York Daily News.

In this case, though, Weiss cited only “speculation” and “discussion” about Utah joining the ACC. As of Thursday night, the post had been viewed 1.1 million times. It took off, as these things do on social media, prompting Utah to issue a stern denial. The school, according to a social media post from McMurphy, described the ACC talk as “completely fabricated and irresponsible.”

As of Friday morning it had been viewed, meanwhile, about 400,000 fewer times than the original post that created the rumor in the first place. And yet amid the speculation there was a worthy thought exercise, nonetheless: Was the prospect of Utah joining the ACC any less crazy than how it would have sounded a year ago to suggest the league would add Cal, Stanford or SMU?

Was it any less crazy than it would have been to say the ACC would add all three of those schools?

Was it any less crazy than it would’ve been to say, in 2021, that Oklahoma and Texas would be soon bound for the SEC? Or, the next year, that UCLA and USC would wind up in the Big Ten? Or, early last summer, that the Pac-12 would essentially be wiped out?

Each of the past three summers have brought immense change to college athletics. Their events have placed the ACC in danger. The question is not how the league will react but whether it can survive, and what survival even looks like. Recent history in college athletics has taught everyone to expect the unexpected.

For the ACC that’s reason enough for hope. The most unexpected outcome, after all, is that the conference finds a way through the turmoil and comes out stronger on the other side.

In the Spotlight designates ongoing topics of high interest that are driven by The News & Observer’s focus on accountability reporting.