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Conference Expansion: Stanford, California and SMU Join the ACC

BeachBumDeac said:
"to take a break from other people having an conversation that they are enjoying, let me spam multiple paragraphs of an article nobody wants to read and bring the thread to a screeching halt again"
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As a person who was in that "conversation," I appreciate Capt posting this article and keeping us informed.
 
“What’s past is prologue.”—Shakespeare

12 conference realignment lawsuit lessons for FSU, ACC and Clemson​

We examined a dozen previous lawsuits involving schools, conferences and realignment. Here’s what we learned.

www.tampabay.com

12 conference realignment lawsuit lessons for FSU, ACC and Clemson

We examined a dozen previous lawsuits involving schools, conferences and realignment. Here’s what we learned.
www.tampabay.com www.tampabay.com
 
The spring meeting of ACC big shots starts today in Amelia Island, FL:

www.espn.com

What's next in Florida State, Clemson lawsuits against the ACC?

As the league begins its spring meetings, questions loom about its future and its relationship with two of its biggest programs.
www.espn.com www.espn.com

AMELIA ISLAND, Fla. -- When the annual ACC spring meetings begin Monday, there will be no way to avoid what has become the story overshadowing the conference: Its long-term future...
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Also, some comments on the ACC spring meeting from Andrew Carter of the N&O/Observer:


...MONEY, MONEY, MONEY What are conference spring meetings these days if not a lot of different conversations that are ultimately really about the same thing? Even when the talks are not directly about money, they’re often actually about ... money. Maximizing television dollars – through ratings and attractive match-ups in football and men’s and women’s basketball – will again take up some significant bandwidth this week. There’s only so much the ACC can do given the length and terms of its contract with ESPN, but the conference’s mission continues to make itself as attractive as possible in terms of TV “inventory.” And speaking of TV: what about that ESPN contract, anyway? For years, it has been widely reported to end in 2036, but FSU has alleged that it actually expires in 2027, and that ESPN needs to exercise an option to extend it. Add that to the list of things that Phillips (along with school athletics directors) probably won’t want to address this week. But it should be cleared up: Can the ACC guarantee its ESPN deal beyond 2027? Is there an opportunity to rework it? Is there concern, given the overall instability throughout the television and cable industry these days, that ESPN might not extend it, if indeed the deal needs extension? All valid questions. In addition to TV revenue, expect some continued grumbling among school administrators and coaches about the overall state of name, image and likeness deals, which have clearly morphed into an unregulated pay-for-play kind of system. A system, by the way, funded by boosters and fans and not the schools themselves. It’s not sustainable, and it seems only a matter of time before schools and conferences will be forced into a revenue-sharing model with athletes. How that looks remains to be seen but the inevitability of it is part of why schools like FSU and Clemson are feeling a special kind of financial pressure. It’s going to cost more and more to retain a seat at the so-called “big boy” table of college football. That’s especially true once schools are directly paying players (instead of relying on fans to do that work for them). A valid question, too, is whether some schools might decide this new world isn’t for them. Though, once you’re committed to going round and round the hamster wheel of big-time college athletics, it has proven impossible to exit.

...BASKETBALL MATTERS What’s this? Some actual discussion about sports? There’ll be some of that over the next three days at the Ritz, too. In years past, a lot of the most important sports-centric conversations have centered on football, and rightfully so. For instance there was, in 2022, the Great Divisions debate about whether the ACC should ditch the Atlantic and Coastal divisions. Which the league did, ultimately. While Coastal Chaos will be missed, the ACC clearly made the right move there. Now that the conference has settled on a division-less model in football, its scheduling model and arrangement in men’s basketball deserves some attention. Yet again, the conference took a national beating this past season on the perception front, with some national pundits going so far to suggest that the Mountain West was a superior basketball conference to the ACC. Some of the takes were absurd and mind-numbing, but they existed, nonetheless, and took hold in a social media-driven sports culture not often built on reality. The ACC again had a Final Four team, in N.C. State. It again out-performed its perceived reputation in March, with four Sweet 16 teams. But how does the conference fight the narrative that it’s a shell of what it was? Expect coaches and athletics directors to discuss cutting back on the 20-game conference schedule, for one. Maybe the ACC goes back to an 18-game model, with an emphasis on protecting and building geographic rivalries. The league, too, needs to figure out a better way to start the season. The Big 12 has figured out that feasting on inferior competition throughout much of November and December is a good way to build some positive publicity. Does the ACC follow that conference’s lead? It’d be bad for fans and anyone who likes watching compelling games, if those kinds of games were to decrease, but avoiding narrative-setting defeats would be good for the league’s image and standing in the computer rankings (and a conversation about those metrics is needed, too). Another order of business: What’s the league’s position on the possible expansion of the NCAA Tournament? Greg Sankey, the SEC Commissioner, seems intent on expanding it – just as he’s intent on imposing his will on a lot of areas throughout the college sports industry. Does the ACC, if it disagrees with Sankey, stand up to him? Do coaches just go along with the thought of tournament expansion, which does not seem particularly popular among fans? Any basketball conversations will be particularly weighty this week, too, now that Bubba Cunningham, the athletics director at North Carolina, begins his tenure as chair of the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee. It’s not like Cunningham has anything else on his plate, what with the turmoil surrounding the ACC and college sports at large. Overall, these spring meetings are likely to be unlike any other in ACC history. There’s plenty of work to be done, as usual, to go along with the intrigue of those coming, and those wishing they were going
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Traitors f$u and clemson allowed to attend??

They should have to pay $500M each just to be there.
 
According to this article by Pat Forde in SI about the ACC meeting and Jim Phillips, Phillips sounds like a very nice guy. After reading it, I thought, hmm, maybe he would have made a better priest than a conference commissioner. 😊

www.si.com

ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips Faces Internal and External Threats to League Survival

Looming lawsuits from two member schools and pressure to keep up with the other three power conference puts Phillips and the ACC in perilous position.
www.si.com www.si.com

...Phillips could be described as an emphatic Catholic—from first genuflection to last, and with every sign of the cross in between, he is punctilious in the practice of worship.

...Phillips’s True Believer worldview expands beyond religion—it’s how he sees college athletics as well. He’s an idealist in an increasingly cynical space, a consensus builder in a predatory environment, a preacher of unity to a fractured congregation. He’s trying to hold together a cathedral of a conference as the winds of change threaten to blow it away....

That 12-year run also established him as the heir apparent to one of his mentors, Jim Delany, as commissioner of the Big Ten—but the league unexpectedly went a different direction in hiring NFL executive Kevin Warren in 2019. At the end of ’20, Phillips got the next-best available job: ACC commissioner.

Ever the idealist, he entered into the infamous “Alliance” with Warren and the Pac-12’s George Kliavkoff in 2021, a reaction to the SEC poaching the Texas Longhorns and Oklahoma Sooners from the Big 12. When Warren then raided the USC Trojans, UCLA Bruins, Oregon Ducks and Washington Huskies from the Pac-12, the Alliance was left in tatters and the balance of power among the Power 5 was forever altered.

“I think the low point [for Phillips] was the Alliance,” says one ACC AD. “He thought that was real.”

...Phillips brings a similar zeal for personal outreach to his job. He sends an email of congratulations to every ACC Athlete of the Week in every sport. “He texts coaches after wins or tough losses,” says Notre Dame Fighting Irish women’s basketball coach Niele Ivey. “He’s very thoughtful and engaged with us.” Athletic directors often receive similar messages.

Is that laudable thoughtfulness, or a waste of time? Some within the league see such interpersonal pleasantries as a sign Phillips is focused on the wrong things. “I don’t think [SEC commissioner] Greg Sankey is spending time sending out those emails,” says one AD. “Jim is incredibly nice, and believes that being nice will get you where you need to go. But it’s not the same as having a strategy. His strategy with ESPN is kindness—ESPN doesn’t respond to kindness. You’ve got to be so strategic and so aggressive in this business.”

Other league ADs praise Phillips. There is an acknowledgement the job has never been harder, and they believe Phillips is doing what he can to keep the ACC “a healthy third,” to quote the commissioner, among conferences...
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So he’s a pushover and didn’t become the Big 10 commissioner because they needed someone cutthroat
 
Real bless your heart energy from those first two anonymous ACC ADs. Third quote could be from Currie.
 
Some UNC trustees have signaled that the Tar Heels may officially join the rebellion against the ACC.

www.wralsportsfan.com

UNC trustees critical of Cunningham, to review athletic department amid budget concerns :: WRALSportsFan.com

The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees also set a $134.9 million budget for the 2024-25 school year.
www.wralsportsfan.com www.wralsportsfan.com

…[Trustee] Boliek said he wants UNC to join a higher-revenue league.

"I am advocating for that," he said. "That's what we need to do. We need to do everything we can to get there. Or the alternative is the ACC is going to have to reconstruct itself. I think all options are on the table."
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That is basically what Maryland did before they bailed. Glorified and premeditated the need for an immediate audit at the university level to say hey we need money or we are going under, so as to be able to justify the pending conference move. Basically sorry we have no choice but to move, wink wink, the accountants told us we have to.

On the bright side, it means we can start the "ACC" chant as we are beating any of FSU, Clemson, or UNC in the baseball tournament coming up.
 
CaptRenault said:
Some UNC trustees have signaled that the Tar Heels may officially join the rebellion against the ACC.

www.wralsportsfan.com

UNC trustees critical of Cunningham, to review athletic department amid budget concerns :: WRALSportsFan.com

The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees also set a $134.9 million budget for the 2024-25 school year.
www.wralsportsfan.com www.wralsportsfan.com
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holes: I'll ask this again then, didn't your breathren ex-commish Swofford get us into this mess to begin with??
 
The funny thing was that when Maryland left for the B10, I thought to my self "if you can't even win the ACC in football, good luck winning a B10 championship". Foolish/naive me, it was never about winning championships. It was about $. I hate to give them credit, but they were playing chess well before we even tried to.
 
york1313 said:
The funny thing was that when Maryland left for the B10, I thought to my self "if you can't even win the ACC in football, good luck winning a B10 championship". Foolish/naive me, it was never about winning championships. It was about $. I hate to give them credit, but they were playing chess well before we even tried to.
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“Doesn’t matter. Got paid.”
 
york1313 said:
The funny thing was that when Maryland left for the B10, I thought to my self "if you can't even win the ACC in football, good luck winning a B10 championship". Foolish/naive me, it was never about winning championships. It was about $. I hate to give them credit, but they were playing chess well before we even tried to.
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They were broke. Worked out for them financially. It’s definitely a worse experience for the fans.
 
york1313 said:
The funny thing was that when Maryland left for the B10, I thought to my self "if you can't even win the ACC in football, good luck winning a B10 championship". Foolish/naive me, it was never about winning championships. It was about $. I hate to give them credit, but they were playing chess well before we even tried to.
Click to expand...
The move to the Big 10 was unpopular at the time among MD fans and alums, and MD Sports have pretty much tanked since they made the move. Their men's basketball team is no longer considered a top 20 program (after winning a Natty and going to multiple final 4s while a member of the ACC), and their football team is about the most irrelvant power V team in the nation. Even their women's hoop team has regressed (MD won the women's natty in 2006), as has their men's soccer program. At this point, I guess its just about survival, and MD will continue to survive in the Big 10. Kudos.

So, I guess MD is "playing chess" in that they joined a conference that has become one of the two dominant conferences in college sports (although not for sustained success), but interest and excitement about their programs has dropped off the table at MD. MD football games have become like NW football games where half the sparse crowd at the games is there to see their conference opponent. It's sad for a big state school that would get raucous home crowds in basketball for every opponent, and in football, when they were good (which was often).

So, congrats for keeping a seat at the table, but never really eating anything good.
 
Pilchard said:
The move to the Big 10 was unpopular at the time among MD fans and alums, and MD Sports have pretty much tanked since they made the move. Their men's basketball team is no longer considered a top 20 program (after winning a Natty and going to multiple final 4s while a member of the ACC), and their football team is about the most irrelvant power V team in the nation. Even their women's hoop team has regressed (MD won the women's natty in 2006), as has their men's soccer program. At this point, I guess its just about survival, and MD will continue to survive in the Big 10. Kudos.

So, I guess MD is "playing chess" in that they joined a conference that has become one of the two dominant conferences in college sports (although not for sustained success), but interest and excitement about their programs has dropped off the table at MD. MD football games have become like NW football games where half the sparse crowd at the games is there to see their conference opponent. It's sad for a big state school that would get raucous home crowds in basketball for every opponent, and in football, when they were good (which was often).

So, congrats for keeping a seat at the table, but never really eating anything good.
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But their chess team is elite.
 
york1313 said:
I don't honestly know how much fan perception matters anymore (if it ever did).
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Well it matters now in terms of how "fan perception" drives NIL.
 
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