As the ACC moves forward, whats best about it could be gone

It would be nice if Saturday night’s ACC men’s basketball tournament final could be digested for what it was: a riveting matchup between schools all of 25 miles apart, two founding members of a 71-year-old conference, meeting for the 180th time.

There is feeling and familiarity between North Carolina and N.C. State whether they play in Chapel Hill or Raleigh or in D.C. as they did Saturday night, an 84-76 upset win for the 10th-seeded Wolfpack. File this one into conference annals, which are already packed with classics. It fits right in, particularly because the two schools know each other so well.

Tar Heels fans know what they think of their Wolfpack counterparts, and Pack backers have fully formed emotions about their Carolina brethren. These games matter not just athletically but culturally on that stretch of Tobacco Road. They have since the schools first faced each other — in 1913.

And to think, next year’s ACC championship game could pit Cal against Miami.

Carolina-vs.-State for a conference title is what college sports used to be. It’s not what they are now. That’s not necessarily a lament, because there’s a path forward in which N.C. State and North Carolina — and Duke and Wake Forest and Virginia, etc. — play each other annually. But as the Pac-12 collapses and the Big Ten and SEC gorge and the ACC tries to duct tape itself together, it’s worth asking whether there is room for what most defines college sports: tradition.

“There has to be,” ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips said in an interview this week. “It’s a beautiful question during a turbulent time that has tentacles that could take away from that, because you’re creating additional competition that hasn’t been the norm or hasn’t been traditional in nature. But you really have to try to protect those rivalries the very best that you can. You have to make that one of the pillars of the work that you’re doing.”

Because if you don’t, then all you have left are fractured pieces of television inventory. Or, put another way, all you have is a mess.

Traditions around these games are far-reaching and all-encompassing. They affect the colors people wear, the songs they sing, the friends they have and the memories they cherish. So many of the Carolina fans filling the bars and restaurants in the District this week — wearing their distinct light blue — remember beating the Wolfpack in the 2007 ACC title game, or the 1997 version, or they have heard stories about 1975 and 1968. Those State fans in red, they cherish the ACC titles won by beating the Heels in 1987 and all the way back to 1959. History and habits are built around it all.

(Full disclosure: When I filed a column off an ACC quarterfinal game this week, my editor messaged me and said, “FYI today is Thursday. You wrote Friday more than once so I figured you might be confused.” Why did I write Friday? Because for the first four-plus decades of my life, the ACC quarterfinals filled a Friday afternoon and evening. Old habits die hard.)

Now, as the ACC stages its signature event with a final that ended up being between two of its original seven members, it’s also fighting to hold together. Florida State is suing the conference, challenging what it says would be $572 million in penalties — from future television rights the ACC says it owns, plus an exit fee — should the school choose to leave the league. The ACC is suing back, arguing FSU agreed to the contracts it is now trying to void.

This, against the backdrop of the Seminoles going undefeated in their signature sport of football — and being left out of the College Football Playoff. There’s a hearing scheduled for next month. What a mess.

“It’s really important to me that those Florida State student-athletes have a really good experience,” Phillips said. “They should not feel any effects from what some adults decide to do in bringing litigation against the conference and obviously the conference against Florida State.”

Right. The athletes are lost in there somewhere.

Look, if there’s money to be made off college athletics — and there is — then by all means, make money, particularly because the workers who produce the product (the players) can now receive at least some of it. There is a market for attending and, particularly, broadcasting college sports. In a universe in which consumers can view shows and movies whenever and wherever they want, live sports still deliver, so the networks pay up.

But the goal of conferences and schools shouldn’t have to be maximizing revenue from the sports they stage. That’s what this shifting landscape feels like: The SEC and the Big Ten are the behemoths that can lure schools by offering more cash. If the fallout is that long-standing leagues are squeezed out or program-defining rivalries come to an end, so be it.

For schools, there is a financial responsibility to explore more lucrative options. There’s a difference between the $58.8 million the Big Ten paid out to its full members in 2022 and the $37.9 million to $41.3 million ACC schools received from the conference, according to USA Today. (SEC schools made $49.9 million apiece during that same year.) But this does feel like some degree of cannibalism. The dollars win. The danger becomes that what defined the leagues and their members is lost.

Just over two decades ago, the ACC started shifting the tectonic plates of college sports when then-commissioner John Swofford tried to shore up his conference’s football future and expand the league’s geographic reach by pursuing Miami, Boston College and Syracuse. The league ended up admitting Virginia Tech and Miami. Don’t remember the details? Don’t worry. The conference doesn’t appear as if it did then, and it will look even less recognizable — and by “less recognizable” I mean “downright weird” — when it adds California, Stanford and SMU (SMU?!) next year.

Oh, and last year, seven ACC schools — Florida State, Clemson, Miami, North Carolina, N.C. State, Virginia and Virginia Tech — held meetings to see whether they could avoid those millions of dollars in penalties if they left the league before the expiration of the media rights deal in 2036. Forget that they haven’t left. Think about what was being discussed: a college sports landscape in which Duke and North Carolina are in different basketball conferences.

“If you forget about your past, it certainly will, to me, hinder your future,” Phillips said.

He’s right. So don’t forget about it. What played out Saturday night at Capital One Arena mattered to Wolfpack and Tar Heels players and coaches, fans and alumni, in a way that — I’m sorry — a game between SMU and Pitt just wouldn’t. If college sports are worth saving — and they are — then let’s remember what’s most worth saving about them: the history, traditions and rivalries that are such a big reason the memories mean so much.

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As the ACC moves forward, whats best about it could be gone