CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Jim Phillips is a true believer. If there was any doubt about it before, there was none left after Wednesday. At a time when not only his conference but college athletics in general is being pulled in new, odd directions by forces both benign and malignant, the ACC commissioner insists on fighting the good fight.
The Big Ten and SEC are dividing up the spoils, California schools are now about to be in a conference with Rutgers, football power has become a magnetic force attracting millions in television money at the expense of logic and the NCAA’s head-in-the-sand failure to proactively address the liberalization of athlete rights allowed reform to be forced upon it with predictable consequences.
That’s just the state of the game in 2022.
Phillips pushed back against all of it in his state-of-the-ACC address at the league’s annual football media extravaganza, lauding the “greater good” of college athletics and pushing back against the consolidation of power in superconferences and “NFL and NBA lite” professionalism — a very idealistic stance in a very realpolitik world.
That can make you a visionary.
That can also make you prey.
“We are not the professional ranks,” Philips said. “This is not the NFL or NBA Lite. We all remain competitive with one another, but this is not and should not be a winner-take-all or a zero-sum structure. College athletics has never been elitist or singularly commercial. It’s provided countless individuals with a path to higher education and, therefore, life-changing possibilities, access, opportunity at a modern rules-based structure, should all remain a priority as we continue to evolve.”
Dangerously naive? Outdated? Perhaps.
There was some sniping from the college-athletics cognoscenti about Phillips’ misplaced faith in his peers — did he learn nothing from the comical implosion of the fabled Alliance? — and what that could mean for the future of the ACC while it’s under threat. That’s more than fair. His repeated metaphor of conferences as different neighborhoods and gated communities was more distracting than clarifying.
And it’s fair to assume his actions behind closed doors are slightly different than his words on the open stage. He certainly made sure to mention the corporate sponsor of the ACC football title game when the subject came up. There is no true purity.
But at a time when the desire for television money has drained the college athletics industrial complex of any shred of principle, when the NCAA has almost completely abdicated any responsibility of leadership, when the power conferences are circling each other like sharks, Phillips remains unwilling to abandon his faith in what this is supposed to be all about.
Unquestionably, college athletics has lost touch with what made it so popular in the first place — the rivalries, the geography, the identity, let alone education. That train has left the station. The ACC is in part to blame for that, plundering the Big East some two decades ago, becoming a television network masquerading as an athletic conference. The slide toward two or three quasi-professional superconferences appears inexorable.
Earlier this week, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey even hinted at the idea of cutting one-bid leagues out of the NCAA basketball tournament — exactly the kind of thing the people running college athletics would do, sacrificing the very heart of the operation for a single shiny nickel.
While Phillips was preaching unity and a rising tide that lifts all ships, his SEC counterpart indicated he saw no reason not to continue to corner the market on lifeboats.
“There are incredible disparities around revenue, around expenses, around support and around expectations in this division,” Sankey said. “It makes it difficult to ensure the presence of shared values and common purpose around supporting athletics programs.”
What’s the end goal here? Whichever conference dies with the most toys wins? Having the most money may line more pockets, but at some point ignoring tradition and history chasing television ratings may dilute if not destroy the product people want to watch — let alone make a mockery of “college” athletics. and what they once meant.
Or what Phillips still believes they can mean, a principled man in an unprincipled world.
“We owe it to those kids,” Phillips said. “This is no time to be waving a white flag on that. I’m not trying to be Pollyannaish about it, because I live in the real world and the real time, just like all of us do, and times change and move, but for us to ignore the affordability and access and opportunity that it provides to young people, I think that would be a huge mistake, huge mistake.”
It’s crazy that in 2022 this is a wild outlier of a position to take. At a time when his colleagues are falling over each other to stab each other in the back, he’s willing to stand for what he truly believes, even at the risk of being mocked for it.
Phillips was willing to declaim that this enterprise still has a soul worth saving. That might not count for anything anymore. But it should.
