ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips: ‘Narrative’ surrounding the league doesn’t match reality

Jim Phillips, in his fourth year as the commissioner of the ACC, found himself in Dallas on Sunday knowing that the conference was going to have a Final Four team no matter what. That regardless of the outcome between N.C. State and Duke in the NCAA Tournament South Regional final, the ACC would be back on college basketball’s most illustrious national stage.

Again. Same as always, it seems.

Yet he knew, too, that one conference team had to lose. It made for a strange and challenging dynamic, said Phillips, who during an interview with The News & Observer on Thursday described watching State’s victory against Duke as a day of “great joy, and a celebratory moment” but one mixed with “great heartache,” for the Blue Devils.

“And we’ve done a lot of that in our conference,” he said, referencing the Duke-North Carolina game in the 2022 national semifinals, which UNC won, and Clemson’s victory against Notre Dame in the men’s soccer national championship game last fall.

“It demonstrates just the level of play and the level of success that we’re having in a multitude of sports,” Phillips said. “But certainly it’s a unique time. You get there and you’re wishing that they weren’t playing each other, honestly — that they both would have a chance to get to the Final Four.

“But that’s how it goes.”

If only the divided allegiance was the most difficult part of his job these days. Phillips, and the ACC, have been under siege in recent months — attacks coming from several angles. Florida State and Clemson, for one, are both suing the conference over its grant of rights agreement. The ACC, for a while now, has fought an ongoing and growing perception problem related to football.

Not even ACC basketball, once considered the national standard of the sport, has been immune. Since after the 2018-19 season, when Duke, UNC and Virginia all earned No. 1 seeds in the NCAA Tournament, the conference has endured annual attacks about its strength and relevance. This season, national pundits routinely dismissed the ACC as inferior; some suggested it wasn’t as good or as deep of a basketball conference as the Mountain West, let alone the Big 12, which became something of a media darling.

It was the continuation of a narrative that has persisted in recent years: That ACC basketball has declined. That it isn’t nearly as strong as it used to be. That other leagues, namely the Big 12 and SEC, have surpassed it. This is the third consecutive season the ACC has received just five NCAA Tournament bids. Compare that to the seven bids it received in 2021 and 2019, and the nine it received in 2018 and 2017.

Despite the relative lack of tournament representation, though, the league’s performance has remained strong — so much so, Phillips said, that “the narrative” surrounding the conference “is not matching the output.” N.C. State is the fourth ACC team to reach the Final Four over the past three seasons. In this NCAA Tournament, the conference had three teams in the Elite Eight, while another, UNC, suffered a two-point loss in the Sweet 16.

Meanwhile, the Big 12, which was considered to be the nation’s strongest conference, didn’t have a single representative in the regional finals. It had two teams in the Sweet 16. That “we only got five teams” in the tournament, Phillips said, “just can’t be.”

The question is how to solve it. Computer metrics — and particularly the NCAA’s NET formula, on which the tournament selection committee has placed significant emphasis — have contributed to the conference’s perception problem. The metrics don’t have a bias, necessarily, but the Big 12, (among others) has clearly learned how to maximize various data points to its benefit.

“We have to take this down to the very bare bones,” Phillips said, “and that’s what we’re doing right now.”

He said the ACC last month created a group, led by North Carolina athletic director Bubba Cunningham, to study the conference’s metrics — both the NET and those at kenpom.com. Part of the group’s charge, Phillips said, is to produce a strategy for the league to enhance those numbers.

Phillips said another priority is for the ACC to sell itself better. The league about six months ago launched a promotional advertising campaign highlighting its accomplishments. The work there continues, Phillips said, with the Wasserman Media Group.

“And I think we need to continue to do a better job with our own network,” Phillips said. “And within our own network, there’s a residual (effect) at the mothership in Bristol, with ESPN. So we have to continue to be aggressive in this space, and find creative ways to continue to tell our story.

“Because we do have a great story.”

Undoubtedly a lot of the ACC’s troubles these days, as they relate to perception and economics, is the result of the relative rise of the Big Ten and SEC. Those two conferences have separated themselves, in a monetary sense, over the past several years, thanks to the success of their own television networks and the value of the broadcast rights to their football games.

About 10 to 15 years ago, five wealthiest conferences in college athletics were all on relatively equal financial footing. Now the Big Ten and SEC form something of their own Power Two. The Pac-12, meanwhile, has been plundered into near non-existence. The Big 12 has managed to market itself as the hip, cool conference on the block.

And then there’s the ACC. Barely hanging on. Or so goes that narrative.

Phillips said he “absolutely” sees as part of his responsibilities a need to stand up to the Big Ten and SEC, both of which seem intent to seize as much power as they can. In recent years, those two conferences have set off a wave of realignment that led to the destruction of the Pac-12, and the perception that both the ACC and Big 12 are now fighting for their long term survival.

Greg Sankey, the SEC Commissioner, has also expressed a desire to change the structure of the NCAA Tournament — which has become, essentially, the only thing the NCAA controls that has maintained any degree of popularity. And the popularity of the event, with its annual Cinderella stories and the creation of March folk heroes, like N.C. State’s DJ Burns, is undeniable.

Sankey, though, has expressed interest in making it a more exclusive event. The SEC, too, arguably set off the latest realignment craze when it poached Texas and Oklahoma from the Big 12. Which led the Big Ten’s poaching of UCLA and USC from the Pac-12. Amid some of those moves, Phillips in the summer of 2022 advocated for major college athletics to more resemble a “healthy neighborhood,” as opposed to a few gated communities.

“I got blasted by some people about the neighborhood analogy and all the rest of it,” Phillips said. “Well, that’s exactly what’s come to fruition here. Is, do we want just a certain subdivision in the community to be healthy or do we want the enterprise to be healthy? Do we want more than one area or one neighborhood to be healthy? And I think you know exactly how I feel about that.”

Phillips said he believes he has fought for the ACC in a public way.

“And I’ve certainly done it quite a bit privately as well with the other commissioners,” he said.

This weekend, meanwhile, will bring along another problem — but one, for a change, he doesn’t mind facing. Last week it was watching two of his schools in the same game in the Elite Eight, knowing that while one would advance to the Final Four the other’s season would end.

And this weekend it’s how to travel to both the men’s and women’s Final Fours. The N.C. State women play Friday night in Cleveland. The State men play the next day, in Phoenix. Travel between the cities isn’t necessarily all that easy. He said he planned to hop on an N.C. State charter flight, along with athletic director Boo Corrigan and chancellor Randy Woodson.

There could be a lot for the three of them to discuss.