After upheaval, ACC riding high
League emerges as pacesetter in college sports
During the league’s annual awards banquet last week, Atlantic Coast Conference administrators and coaches were treated to a 12minute video highlighting the successes of the past year. It’s pretty standard fare at the annual meetings for college conferences. But there was undeniably something extra — not just on the screen, with those clips of Clemson winning a national championship in football or North Carolina doing the same in men’s basketball.
Well, it was those. But it was something more — a pervasive sense that the ACC has climbed to the top of college sports.
“I don’t know that it gets much better than this from a competitive standpoint,” said John Swofford, the league’s longtime commissioner.
Unless, of course, it does. That’s the hope, if not the belief, for a conference that has emerged from a period of upheaval into what Swofford called “normalcy … getting back to the normal business of this league and what we do.”
In part, the reference is to the league’s emergence from several rounds of realignment into what appears to be stability. But the clear anticipation is there’s a new normal.
“I think we’re the best league in ball,” Florida State football coach Jimbo Fisher said.
He meant football — which is the biggest catalyst in the ACC’s surge — and he has a pretty good argument.
Clemson’s victory against Alabama to win the College Football Playoff completed the ACC’s best year in the sport. The ACC went 9-3 in bowls, including 4-1 against the Southeastern Conference. Add the regular season, and it was 10-4 against that other league — and that’s the constant comparison.
Yeah, there are three other Power Five leagues. But the ACC essentially shares its geographic footprint with the SEC. For years, the conference has endured talk of being a basketball league — and that’s not an acknowledgment of the ACC’s status as a traditional hoops powerhouse, but a statement that it was not a football power.
It is now. North Carolina’s basketball title is a reminder that nothing much has changed in that department. But ACC football’s rise runs deeper than Clemson’s victory vs. Alabama — which was the league’s second national title in four seasons (ACC teams have played for three in that span and been in the College Football Playoff each year of its short existence). It’s the league’s overall depth. Clemson, Florida State, Virginia Tech, Miami (Fla.) and Louisville were ranked in the final Amway Coaches Poll.
It’s more than football, of course. Swofford tracked the ACC’s reason for celebration to before the school year even began. Last summer, the ACC an- nounced its members had extended their grant of rights agreement to 2035-36 — an indication of the league’s stability as it emerged from several rounds of realignment. Not long after, the launch of the ACC Network in collaboration with ESPN was announced. The network will provide more exposure — and, as important, more money, which will help the ACC close part of the gap between the Big Ten and SEC in revenue. (In fiscal year 2016, the ACC reported $373.4 million, according to its federal tax return. The per-school distribution ranged from $22.6 million to $27.9 million, lowest among Power Five conferences. By comparison, the SEC’s distribution ranged from $41.9 million to $39.1 million.)
The launch of the ACC Network is two years away. In light of recent layoffs at ESPN and uncertainty over the future of the cable TV model, Swofford has spent the last few weeks batting down speculation that it might never launch. It will, he said, in August 2019.
“Everything is completely on schedule with that,” he said.
And for now, at least, everything is on schedule for the ACC’s upward mobility — if, that is, football can maintain its trajectory. Administrators and coaches at the league’s meetings pointed to years of investment in the sport — facilities, infrastructure, coaches — finally paying off. Saying perception often lags behind reality, Swofford called it a “four- to five-year bump … from top to bottom.”
“You can’t count on that every year,” said Swofford, referring to the football success of 2016. “That’s the reality. But it really is good to see, because the optics have changed over the last five years. We needed that as a league.”
Getting to this point was not easy. Sustaining it might be at least as difficult a challenge.
“You’ve got to win,” North Carolina football coach Larry Fedora said. “We know the history of basketball in this league, and we wanted to climb to where they were. I think we’ve done that. We don’t have the same history, but we’ve done it in the last four or five years. We’re pretty happy about that.
“Now it’s going to be staying there that’s hard, because we’re not sneaking up on anybody.”
“I don’t know that it gets much better than this from a competitive standpoint.” ACC Commissioner John Swofford