ACC commissioner Jim Phillips acknowledged that he would be criticized for a lot of what he said Wednesday about the unsettled present and uncertain future of college football. So give him that. He knew he would sound Pollyannaish.
And, in further fairness, some of what he said wasn’t wrong.
It just probably isn’t right. At least not these days.
Phillips kicked off the ACC’s football media festivities with a stump speech and question-and-answer session that could have been delivered two generations ago.
He assailed the relentless pursuit of profits. He cautioned that every school and league needed to consider the greater good, not simply their own bottom line. He spoke up for non-revenue sports, smaller conferences and even the bowl industry.
He said hokey things like, “We owe it to those kids” when talking about the importance of athletics at places such as Northern Illinois, where he was once the athletic director.
“Any new structure of the NCAA must serve the many, not a collective few,” Phillips said. “We are not the professional ranks. This isn’t the NFL- or NBA-Lite. This shouldn’t be a winner-take-all or zero-sum structure. College sports have never been elitist or singularly commercial.”
In the past year the SEC and Big Ten have expanded their future ranks to 16, raided two conferences (Big 12 and Pac-12) for its biggest athletic brands and are poised to make $50 million, $60 million, maybe $80 million more per school than the ACC in media revenue alone.
They are being pushed by two dueling television behemoths (Fox and ESPN) who don’t see the establishment of an “NFL-Lite” as a bad thing considering the NFL itself is the biggest and most profitable entertainment property in the country.
“Singularly commercial” is today’s reality. Phillips talked about avoiding gated communities in college athletics while claiming the ACC is on the desired side of that gate.
He’s correct. It is … for now.
Check back in five years though.
“All neighborhoods need to be healthy,” Phillips said. “It’s not good for college athletics if they’re not. We understand where those two leagues are. No one is ignoring that. We’re all trying to find ways to close that gap.”
It’s not Phillips’ fault that the ACC is saddled with a disastrously long and comparatively revenue-poor media deal. He has…