In ‘get busy’ or perish times, Jim Phillips talks ACC’s future in Charlotte, out West

Jim Phillips has seen a lot in his short tenure as ACC commissioner — from the relocation of the conference’s headquarters to Charlotte, to the expansion of the conference’s membership out West, and more.

It’s a product of today’s “get busy” or perish times.

And perishing?

“That was not going to happen in our league,” Phillips explained in Charlotte on Wednesday. “It just wasn’t.”

As the special guest at a meeting with the Hood Hargett Breakfast Club in Charlotte, the commissioner addressed what has gone right in his two-year tenure, and what the future holds for a conference finding its way during a transformative time in college athletics.

Here are four things of note he discussed.

Latest on SMU, California, Stanford joining ACC

For those needing a recap:

ACC presidents and chancellors voted in September to add Stanford, California and Southern Methodist to the conference starting in the 2024-25 school year. That brought the conference to 18 members — and punctuated a dramatic few months of debate between two factions in the league: those who wanted more schools and guaranteed vitality (read: the disintegrating Pac 12), and those who sought more revenue in a world where competitive advantages in football are found in pocketbooks as much as they’re found in philosophy.

Phillips explained to the crowd on Wednesday that the league made this move for a few reasons.

“One is stability of the league,” he said. “The Big 10’s at 18 schools. The SEC is at 16. The Big 12 is at 16. We’ll be at 18. The landscape of media contracts coincide with movement in the expansion area, and so when you saw the SEC expand, and when you saw the Big 10 expand, it was because their media deals were coming up.

“And so these three schools that are going to be really good additions for us, from now and into the future, we feel like we have the best grouping of academic and athletic schools in the country.”

Conferences have historically been based on geography. Rivalries live in regions. So do institutional identities — and the country’s best conference have adopted those virtues and benefited from them for decades.

Bringing schools from Texas and the West Coast to the Atlantic Coast Conference dilutes this premise. It also adds to the headache of more travel for college athletes, detractors say.

But as Phillips pointed out Wednesday, many sports play tournament-style formats. The teams with home-and-home schedules on the East Coast won’t play all three of the new teams every year. (It’s more like once every two years, depending on how scheduling shakes out.)

And that’s without mentioning: ACC schools were already traveling to the West Coast quite a bit.

“What the research showed us was that we’re going out there already,” Phillips said. “We’re traveling out there at a high volume, but we’re traveling out there for non-conference games.”

Any plans to bring ACC basketball tournament games out West?

The addition of these schools prompts the question: Will there be any ACC championships held on the other side of the country any time soon?

For football? No. In 2018, the ACC, Charlotte Sports Foundation and Carolina Panthers announced a 10-year agreement to keep the ACC Football Championship Game in Charlotte’s Bank of America Stadium through the 2030 season.

But could the basketball tournament be played out West?

“No one is ready to make a decision on that just yet,” Phillips told a few local reporters Wednesday. “I know we want to get the three schools and just kind of sort out regular season.”

Lifelong North Carolinians remember the league’s men’s and women’s basketball tournaments being held in the Greensboro Coliseum for decades. It’s now on an informal rotation of sites — Brooklyn, Charlotte, Greensboro and Washington among them — and the future of any tournament sites beyond 2024 haven’t yet been named, although Charlotte is considered the most likely host in 2025. The ACC has to play four of the next nine tournaments in North Carolina — two in Greensboro — after taking a $15 million handout from the state.

On ‘growing roots’ in Charlotte

It was big news in September 2022 when the league announced it was moving its headquarters from Greensboro to Charlotte. Phillips said Wednesday that it wouldn’t forget the history that rested in Greensboro — the home of the conference since its founding in a smoke-filled room inside a hotel there 70 years ago — but that the Queen City offers possibilities that Greensboro couldn’t.

On Wednesday, a year and a few months after that announcement, Phillips said the conference is intent on growing roots in Charlotte.

“First of all, we have nearly 100,000 ACC alumni in Charlotte,” Phillips said. “I think that’s a pretty good foundation for us to work off of. We bring championships here. Every year you do that, you create this draw to the Queen City, and that allows you to grow roots.”

He added: “I’m really committed to making sure we become really good citizens and do good work for the city of Charlotte. We’re marketing, we’re advertising, you see stuff at the airport, in the city, you’re gonna see banners. That was all part of the commitment by the city to draw us here. We need their help. We need them to market and promote the ACC, promote the events that are coming up. So I like what we’re doing in that space.”

Increasing ACC revenue isn’t only way to achieve success

The substantial revenue gap between the ACC and other Power Five conferences was a talking point this offseason. Florida State and Clemson, specifically — two schools that have carried the conference’s mantle of football success — have reportedly been unhappy about the ACC’s revenue distribution in football, something that won’t likely change until the ACC’s TV deal ends in 2036.

But Phillips reiterated what he said during this year’s ACC Kickoff, the media event held in Charlotte ahead of the college football season:

Success and revenue are connected — but not one and the same.

“I put it this way: Are we chasing a dollar amount, or are we chasing success?” Phillips said.

The ACC, he noted, has the most national championships across all sports than any other conference and is tied for second in College Football Playoff appearances with the Big Ten at eight.

He added: “Sometimes, what the tone is ends up being a little different than what the truth is. So I want us to chase more revenue for our student-athletes and for our schools. We have to do that. I just get lost when it has to be at a certain number. ... Let’s not say you can’t have success at the level that the ACC has — which is the highest level in college sports — because we’re not at a certain threshold financially compared to some of our peers.”