Jim Phillips believes ACC can bridge revenue gap with Big Ten, SEC
The 2023 ACC Kickoff is underway in Charlotte as teams in the conference are meeting the media over the next three days ahead of the start of the upcoming season. To kick things off on Tuesday, commissioner Jim Phillips met the media to discuss a variety of topics.
One of those topics happened to be the revenue gap between the ACC and its competition, the SEC and Big Ten.
With conference realignment being a big topic over the past year and a report that seven teams were looking to leave the conference, Phillips addressed the revenue gap and he believes that the conference can bridge that gap.
“We remain in constant communication with Disney and ESPN, as there is no single business partnership in our industry that is valued more than with a conference’s media rights holder,” Phillips said to the media. “In certainly one of the most turbulent times in history for both media and college sports, I and the ACC have never felt better about our relationship than we do today. Our commitment to collaborate on way the ACC from a revenue and exposure standpoint has been unwavering.
The work that’s been done over this past year, particularly in the last six months, as the Disney leadership and ESPN has been solidified, has been incredibly important to our partnership are. Jimmy Pitaro, Burke Magnus, Roz Durant, Nick Dawson and their entire team have been terrific, and collectively we have, one, agreed on a comprehensive, mutually beneficial growth and innovation strategy moving forward. And, second, put in motion several priority initiatives, the combination of which we believe will transform our conference for years to come.”
The talk of revenue has been a big topic among the conference with teams speaking out against it and potentially looking to move to a new conference to earn more money.
So revenue generation continues to be a priority. But let me be clear also, this league is third right now in revenue as we go forward into wherever the next TV deals are for other conferences where, we’ve looked at it. We’ve had multiple TV consultants. Third is certainly a good position, but we want to gain and gain traction financially in order to close the gap with obviously the SEC and the Big Ten, who have leapfrogged everyone.
However, Phillips also mentioned that those tensions have gone down a little bit since those meetings in the Spring.
Phillips did expand a little more on the revenue gap which you can read the full transcript via Tar Heels Illustrated here.
It seems like for now talks of teams leaving the ACC have cooled down just a bit.
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