While FSU and Clemson try to bolt ACC, commish Jim Phillips offers stern rebuke and says league is 'inside that top three'

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Inside a small second-floor board room of a Hilton hotel on Monday, Jim Phillips escapes, at least temporarily, from the bustle of the opening day of his league’s media days.

Seated at the head of the table, Phillips, the ACC commissioner, gestures toward the four loose pages before him that bear out his conference’s superlatives.

Seven different ACC schools, for instance, won team NCAA championships this year to go with the 16 won the previous two years. The three-year total of 23 titles leads all conferences. The ACC, too, leads all power conferences in several rankings, including the U.S. News & World Report, NCAA graduation rates and NCAA academic performance figures.

The list goes on. The league brought in a record $700 million in total revenue last year and distributed $45 million each to its members — the third-most in the country. And, finally, the ACC is home to two of the three active head football coaches to have won a national championship and has won the second-most CFP titles of any conference in the past decade.

To Phillips, those questioning whether the ACC is the third-best conference in college athletics behind the SEC and Big Ten need look no further than the list before him.

“We are not chasing third. By any metric of significance — CFP appearances, national championships, having our own network, revenue generation, academic prowess — I’m comfortable where the ACC is: inside that top three,” he told Yahoo Sports in an interview Monday.

Not long before that, Phillips, often of mild-temperament and mostly uncontroversial, opened this four-day event in Charlotte with an hour-long impassioned, and at times, brazen speech about the state of the ACC.

He blistered Florida State and Clemson for their “disruptive and harmful” attempt to exit by suing their own conference, maintained that the ACC is committed to fighting the schools in court for “as long as it takes” and passionately defended former commissioner John Swofford, the target of public attacks for the long-term television contract with ESPN that has some members restless as other league media deals soar.

He did something else, too. Mostly absent of subtleties, he painted a clear picture of the pecking order in college athletics: the SEC, Big Ten and … the ACC.

“The ACC is one of the top three conferences in overall revenue generated and distributed,” he reinforced, “and we fully expect that to continue and grow.”

Two words went mostly unmentioned here in Charlotte: Big 12.

And, yet, the public volleys from Phillips felt unmistakingly directed toward that other conference, some 13 days after its commissioner, Brett Yormark, kicked off his own media days in Las Vegas by claiming his league to have “solidified ourselves as one of the top three conferences in America.”

While the Big 12 more publicly explores private equity and conference naming rights, the ACC has privately examined the matters, Phillips said. “Just because we haven’t talked about it publicly,” he started before trailing off. “Shame on anyone who thinks that we haven’t worked on those things and others in a private and confidential manner.”

Finding untapped sources of revenue is a chief priority for the ACC and Big 12, each of them having fallen financially behind the SEC and Big Ten. The gaps in television distribution — a primary reason for FSU and Clemson’s attempted exits — could soar to as much as $30 million per school within the next two years.

But help is on the way, says Phillips. The league is using its College Football Playoff distribution and additional ESPN-related monies from expansion ($600 million) to create what it terms a “success initiative” fund that pays units to individual schools based on reaching benchmarks, including qualifying for a bowl game, finishing in the top 25, and participating and advancing in the CFP.

An ACC team could earn as much as $25 million, Phillips said. That’s gap-closing, real cash, he contends. Indeed, the initiative will help “mitigate the gap,” said Miami athletic director Dan Radakovich. While more money doesn’t always lead to more success, there is a correlation between success and resources, North Carolina AD Bubba Cunningham told Yahoo Sports this past spring. And in the new era of college athletics, “it’s incumbent to be successful in football,” he added.

But it won’t close the gap completely, said Florida State athletic director Michael Alford.

Because of the new CFP distribution model — 58% of the cash going to the SEC and Big Ten — ACC teams will be more like $40 million behind schools in those two conferences.

“This is why the success initiatives in our conference are so important. It’s important to invest so you can be able to capitalize and close that gap as best you can,” Alford told Yahoo earlier this year, “but [the CFP] moving away from performance-based incentives has made the gap almost impossible for individual programs to close.”

Florida State officials have rattled their saber more than those from any other ACC program in terms of publicly criticizing their own conference. Locked in a lawsuit in an effort to get free of a grant-of-rights agreement 12 years before it expires, the Seminoles are using legal methods to expose ACC contracts normally kept private.

The internal strife lingers over the league as a whole — even over these media days. After all, Florida State head coach Mike Norvell and players attended Monday’s opening day alongside those from SMU, the very same SMU that joined the conference this year despite FSU and others (Clemson and North Carolina) voting against expansion last August.

It’s a weird dynamic at play, a sort-of dysfunctional family that Phillips is attempting to tame as best he can.

“We’ve had six months of disruptions. I think we’ve handled it incredibly well,” Phillips said. “There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t spend some time on the [Clemson and FSU lawsuits]. And I don’t think that’s going to change.”

Could it? Would the ACC welcome back into the league two programs if, say, there was nowhere else for them to go?

“The idea is for them to be in the league. That’s what we are working towards with this suit, that they are part of our league,” Phillips said.

Those at Clemson and FSU feel that, if they are legally unhinged from the ACC’s grant of rights, there will be takers.

But it is unlikely that any SEC or Big Ten school will agree to accept a reduction in their TV distribution to add any school. For the SEC, that is especially so given its footprint: the league already owns a foothold in South Carolina and in Florida.

In order for the Big Ten and SEC to expand, they’d likely need more money from their television partners — a lot more money (more than $100 million a year). That’s primarily Fox for the Big Ten and ESPN for the SEC.

Could the ACC appease its two restless members with more money? Perhaps.

There is another avenue for untapped revenues: the ESPN contract itself. Though the standard belief is that the contract extends through 2036, that’s not actually true. The deal ends in 2027.

ESPN must elect by next February to opt in for another nine years. The ACC and ESPN are in active negotiations over the extension, conversations that Phillips has described as “positive and productive.”

Could the network increase the value of the deal?

“We’re talking about that,” Phillips said.

But enough about all of this, the commissioner says. There is football to soon be played — one of the more pressure-packed seasons in ACC history. For the ACC and Big 12, the heat is on to advance as many teams as possible into the 12-team expanded College Football Playoff beyond the automatic bids that their champions receive.

The two conferences added a combined seven new teams. They now nearly stretch from coast to coast.

Nearly five weeks before the season kicks off, the politicking about CFP at-large bids has started. A banner welcomed media day attendees into the lobby of the Hilton on Monday with another one of Phillips’ superlatives: “The ACC,” it noted, “has the toughest non-conference schedule in the country.”

An usual message for a league to display? Maybe. But these are unusual times.