RALEIGH, N.C. — The ACC tournament was a baptism by fire for new commissioner Jim Phillips, who was on the job for less than six weeks before things got weird in Greensboro. It'll be another month yet before he can complete a conference-wide tour, visiting all 15 campuses before April is out.
Before things slow down, there are still the men's and women's NCAA tournaments on his agenda, with a total of 15 ACC teams competing, including two women's teams with strong Final Four chances in N.C. State and Louisville.
Getting to know the ACC might not be an issue if Phillips had deeper roots in the conference, but the presidents wanted the former Northwestern athletic director in part because he was an outsider who could bring fresh ideas and new perspective to a conference that has significant strengths in some areas and equally significant weaknesses in others.
More than anything, he's looking forward to finally getting his feet on the ground, not just figuratively but literally: From South Bend to Coral Gables, Winston-Salem to Chestnut Hill.
"It's really important for me to listen and learn right now," Phillips told the News & Observer on Tuesday. "I know action is required; you have to act on certain situations that come up. But it will be most beneficial for me to have a chance for a period of listening and learning. We have wonderful people who know the conference well, who know the history, who know why we got to certain places. It will serve the conference well if I do that in a really thoughtful and intentional way."
Normally, these collegiate executive transitions take place in May or June, in the academic and athletic offseason, when there is little pressing business and plenty of time for acclimation — especially important for someone coming from the outside to a conference as deep in tradition as the ACC, where the power structure isn't always what it seems on the surface.
Phillips never had that luxury. When John Swofford announced his retirement, he said he would serve until his contract expired in June 2021. But when Phillips was hired in December, the ACC presidents initially wanted him to start March 1, then moved that up to Feb.1 — in the middle of a season, in the middle of a pandemic. Eight or so hours after attending a Northwestern basketball game against Rutgers in his last official act in Evanston, he woke up hours later the commissioner of the ACC. No break. No transition.
That not only denied John Swofford a farewell tour in Greensboro but put Phillips in an awkward position last weekend. He was criticized not only in these pages but by others — including Richmond's David Teel, the current dean of the ACC media corps — for his continued silence as Duke and then Virginia had to exit because of positive COVID-19 tests. It seemed like a moment where the new commissioner needed to make his presence known, but Phillips felt that making his first public appearance under those conditions would distract from the tournament and players.
He has started reaching out to specific members of the ACC media this week in wide-ranging interviews about the state of the ACC as he sees it upon his arrival, but the unavoidable reality is that despite his deep grounding in NCAA issues in general — he served a two-year term as the inaugural chairman of the Division I Council when the NCAA created that group to oversee Division I — there's still a lot to learn about how they apply to the ACC specifically.
Some of it is easy: The conference Monday lifted all restrictions on transfers within the conference, taking the final step from what was once one of the most restrictive rules in college athletics to the least in the space of two years. But the rest of it, from the impending sea change regarding athlete name, image and likeness rights to the significant revenue gap between the ACC and the other Power 5 conferences on a per-school basis, is as complicated as it gets.
The ACC's per-school distribution was $29 million in 2018-19, while the Big Ten was at $56 million, the SEC at $45 million, the Big 12 at $38 million and the Pac-12 at $32 million. In the long term, the ACC hopes the network will eventually add about $10 million per school, but that would still leave the ACC in third if everything else remains equal.
Phillips may be a basketball guy — he was a college assistant coach and, until taking the ACC job, had two years left on the NCAA men's basketball selection committee — taking over what's always been known as a basketball conference, but he knows the answer is football.
"It's a significant revenue gap," Phillips said. "How do we strengthen football in our conference? This isn't a time for the conference to do anything other than continue to commit to all of our sports, including basketball, but that doesn't mean you can't increase or support football at a higher level, and not at the expense of someone else. That's not how it works. You can bring all the programs up together."
There is one other way to bump the numbers: Convince Notre Dame to join as a full-time member after a successful pandemic integration of football in 2020. Phillips, who worked for four years at Notre Dame, doesn't sound like he's counting on that.
"That benefited Notre Dame and it benefited the ACC but Notre Dame values its independence," Phillips said. "It's been in their history since the very first time they played the game of football. That's a decision that really rests in South Bend. We all respect that. It doesn't diminish how we feel about them. The reality is, we'll see how the relationship goes and we'll continue to build it."
Phillips also pointed out that with the ACC Network exceeding carriage projections — even with Comcast still hanging out there, a big hole in the footprint — the situation may not be as bad as the current numbers indicate. The network's true financial impact won't start to be felt for a few more years, especially since the production facilities each campus had to construct as part of the network launch makes it more of a partnership than some other college networks.
"And that ties into the revenue piece of it," Phillips said. "A lot of these things are interconnected. They may live in separate areas but they bump into each other. When you address one of them, you end up having to address multiple areas of emphasis."
There are other issues that will need to be resolved along the way, from the geographic future of the ACC tournament (Phillips was part of the Big Ten when that conference went a week early in 2018 to get access to Madison Square Garden) to the geographic future of the ACC office, whether it makes sense to remain in Greensboro or move to Charlotte (where ESPN has a production facility) or Atlanta or Washington.
Those are topics that will require a deep grounding in the history and future of the ACC to adequately assess. Even an insider would need time to get a sense of the political winds. One basketball tournament in Greensboro — one not in full bloom — is just the start. If he's had a busy first six weeks, thrown into the deep end of the pool, it's really only the beginning.
