Andrew Carter
The News & Observer
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — On the way to Charlotte early last week, and to the ACC’s annual preseason football kickoff, all was quiet off of John D. Swofford Lane. The street, only about 250 feet long, extends a little ways off the Grandover Parkway, which itself runs parallel to I-85 for a short stretch a little ways southwest of Greensboro.
The ACC’s headquarters had been there for decades, next to a golf course on the Grandover Resort, until just recently. Until the moving trucks came and the offices began to empty and the conference decided to leave Greensboro behind, along with the little road named after the man who served as its commissioner for 24 years.
The flags were still there, one for North Carolina and the ACC on either side of the American flag, but there wasn’t anybody around to see them. A big Penske moving truck sat backed up near the front door. A dumpster sat next to that, there to collect anything the conference wasn’t taking with it.
It felt a little apocalyptic, a place that was once among the epicenters of American college sports, turning into something like a ghostly office park. A place where the ACC celebrated and engineered many a triumph, now ready for its abandonment. When the conference moved into that space, in late 1996, it was the wealthiest league in college athletics, the envy of its peers. ACC basketball, back then, was the most valuable college athletics television property in the country.
And how things change.
The conference’s football media days began Tuesday with the league’s desire to celebrate new beginnings. The beginning of a new college football season, for one, in which at least a few schools — Clemson, Florida State, maybe even North Carolina — will enter August with championship aspirations. The beginning, too, of a new era for the ACC, which will complete its move to Charlotte in a few weeks, though the relocation is already pretty much official.
The ACC has been desperate for a while now to change the narrative, and to alter the dominant perception that has surrounded the conference for a little more than a year: that it’s only a matter of time before the league begins its demise; that regardless of what happens on the field or the court, the conference is more or less doomed in the long term, due to the ever-widening revenue gap between the ACC and the Big Ten and SEC.
And so Jim Phillips, Swofford’s successor, hit all the usual talking points during his opening state-of-the-league address earlier this week: the nine national championships ACC members won last academic year; the continued emphasis on branding and expanding the league’s television presence; the pride in academics and the league’s argument, as Phillips put it, that “there are no better collection of schools, and our student-athlete experience and support beyond athletics and academics is second to none.
“The bottom line is our conference is strong,” Phillips said in his next breath, “and I’m extremely bullish about our future together.”
The move to Charlotte was part of that. The ACC has not yet finished that move — some staffers are already working in Charlotte; others will arrive in the weeks to come — and yet Phillips already lauded the business opportunities now available to the league that might not have been before (a debatable contention, it should be noted). Phillips spoke of “the positive energy” brewing between the city and conference, the “multiple league meetings in Uptown” Charlotte, which provided the chance to meet with local business leaders and professional sports teams.
All good things. And yet it was only a matter of time before the ACC continued its haphazard swirl through the greater turmoil of college athletics. Tuesday, for once, felt a little normal. A little boring, almost, in that the primary conversation of the day focused on football, which is how the ACC would prefer it. For once, at this event, there weren’t the endless questions about the league’s future; about this realignment move, or that one; about revenue gaps and the grant of rights.
The calm lasted all of about a day.
By Thursday, Colorado’s move from the Pac-12 to the Big 12 was official — making it three summers in a row that an ACC Kickoff went on amid the backdrop of major-conference realignment. In 2021, it was Texas and Oklahoma announcing their intention to join the SEC, while last year the news of the Big Ten’s impending addition of USC and UCLA dominated the summer. And now, Colorado.
By Thursday night, amid a report from a Florida State-focused website that suggested the university’s efforts to leave the ACC were intensifying, Phillips again found himself in defense mode, which is becoming the usual for him. The league’s kickoff event had been over only a few hours and many of the reporters who attended it were still making their way home when Phillips responded to the Florida State speculation by telling ESPN the ACC was “absolutely” open to expansion. Not a new revelation, necessarily, but one meant to calm the turbulence, and express a willingness to act.
The problem, though, is that short of adding Notre Dame as a full-time member — not happening, and certainly not anytime soon — there’s not a whole lot the ACC can do to change the narrative and provide an image of strength. This is the conference’s new reality, a discomforting one of responding to whatever college athletics shoe drops next while waiting for someone to challenge the grant of rights.
Maybe Florida State, with its three-game losing streak against Wake Forest in football; with its .500 conference record since the start of the 2015 season, becomes that challenger. Maybe it’s a group of schools, acting as one. Maybe it’s nobody, until many years from now when the financial blow from leaving the league might feel more palatable for those considering it.
The only thing that’s clear for now in a time of uncertainty for college athletics is that this is just the ACC’s world now. One of seeking new beginnings while finding the same old narratives and questions inescapable. One of celebrating a new home in Charlotte while the old one sits empty about 90 miles northeast, a quiet reminder of a time of stability now long gone.
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