What did Adam call him?

We're joined here at the ACC tournament by my idea of a quad one guest.

The commissioner of the ACC, Jim Phillips. Take that as a take that as a call. You are a quad one guest. Adam, I haven't called a lot of things in life. That's one of my favorites. I may have to steal that. You can.

You absolutely can. Have we had too much talk about quad this and quad that? Not really. Not really when you're fighting for survival, you're trying to get in.

The tournament means so much to anybody in the sport of basketball and you've worked maybe a year or three years, four years as a student athlete off season to get a chance to have some magic happen in March. So no, but as I look at it, I'm a former kind of recovering committee member, both on the women's and men's side. So I've been in that room. It's not an easy assignment at all.

And you really do take the assignment very seriously because you want to try to get it right. But sometimes, Adam, I would just say this. We spend too much time looking at the metrics and not enough time at points of the season by just the eye test. Just watch teams play. And when I look at our league this year, five teams are talked about going in and then there's question about Clemson in North Carolina. I would just say this. Clemson's won 14 games in the ACC.

Enough. We can talk about their win at NC State or their win at Pitt where nobody won, etc. But they want to bring up a game in November, right?

And I think that for us in our league, like a lot of leagues, teams get better as the season goes on. And in all the Carolina pieces, as I told the committee member, I hear you, I see where they're at and we'll see what happens this week. But that looks to be, to me, an NCAA tournament team.

I know that the record in some of those things and the quad won as you led this segment off. But at the end of the day, I truly believe they're an NCAA tournament team. So we'll see what happens.

Do you get into the office in the morning or on your phone on the way in as somebody else is driving? Check the net and see what the net is. Are you a daily viewer of that? I'm a little frustrated with it and we want the NCAA to know.

And I love that group. And the net has taken over for what formerly was the RPI. So you need some metric. And I think there's some benefit to that.

Something that can take a look at the sample size of 363 Division I teams and try to rank them according to certain metrics. But it's maddening when you beat a quad one team and you go down overall in the net. And teams with 14, 15, 16 losses near the top of the net or in the top quadrant of the net.

So it'll balance itself out. I have faith in the committee members. Bubba Cunningham, the director of athletics at North Carolina, is a member of that 12-person committee. You're not allowed to speak about your particular team.

If you're asked a question, it has to be factual, yes or no type of thing. So we'll see what happens. And those are two teams we're not sure about. But we have five others that I think are outstanding. And the last thing I said to the committee members that called this week as we have a monthly kind of get together and give them the resume is you only gave us five last year. Maybe you thought that's what we earned, but I would just say nobody had a better tournament than we did last year in the ACC, 13 and 5. Try not to do that again.

Or if they do it again, you do it again. See, I understand why they don't want, and I'm not going to make this all about this type of thing, but I understand why they don't want to say, well, history is one thing, this year is a separate thing. What happened before can't impact what happens now. And I know it's not necessarily your job to sing the praises of the league. Maybe it's the coaches.

Maybe it's my job, and I think we've tried to do the best we can there. But what I don't understand is that SEC football stands on its own merits, and it doesn't matter if they play a poor non-conference schedule or the rotation is such where you only play two really good teams all year. If you're an SEC school and you've got eight wins, we're an SEC school.

And that's enough for the football people. For some reason, the ACC in basketball isn't getting the same kind of, I guess, unconditional love. Well said. Couldn't say any better.

All right, we'll move on. And what I would also say is we do suffer from some of our past in a good way. And that is when North Carolina and Duke, who have been enormous brands and enormous success in the league, when they're not at the top of the league, and more specifically, when they're not in the top 10 nationally, there's this connection to, well, the league must not be that good. You haven't seen Miami play then. You haven't seen Virginia play. You haven't seen our teams play if that's what you surmise from North Carolina and Duke maybe not being in the top 10 in a particular year.

All right, let me get to a couple of other things. Jim Phillips, the commissioner of the ACC, is with us here at the ACC tournament. There is so much change in college sports from NIL to realignment to revenue sharing, which is a whole brand new conversation that I don't know if we ever thought we would have, and kind of going away from the EC just divvying it up, dividing by 15 or 14. So where do you stand on something like that?

And this is kind of couched in. We understand what the AD at Florida State said to the board of trustees. So what can be done to make everyone happy in this situation? Well, first of all, we're going to continue to work together, and that's what we've done for a period of time.

And I'm proud of how our group has come together, whether it's the CEOs, meaning our board of our board of presidents and chancellors, or the athletic directors. This is a time where you have to try to do everything you can to assess the issue and then address it. And that's what our conversations have been.

We went from not talking about this at all when I first arrived to having conversations about every time we get together. So I don't think that there is what I would call a silver bullet at them that would fix some of those disparities between us and a few of the other leagues. So you have to be creative. You have to do some of the things we've done with our sponsorship stuff, with the hiring of fish bait, with what we've done with television, the distribution piece. That's all generated revenue, additional revenue that we didn't have a few years ago.

We'll continue to look at ways, whether it's a revenue share or a success initiative or any of those types of things that could obviously keep the conference stable and make sure everybody's in a pretty healthy spot, but reward those and incentivize those that are really putting resources, additional resources to our having success. So we're going to work through it. And again, people are open-minded and I really give the board an awful lot of credit. And what occurred at Florida State, that was nothing new. We've been talking about those issues. So there wasn't anything surprising about the content there. It did seem, an editorial comment for me, it did seem like Mr. Alford forgot the one part of that equation, the grant of rights. He almost left it all hanging out there.

And I'm like, wait a second, there is something else there. What can the league do to bridge the gap? And this is not to help Florida State or Clemson or anybody else, but we know what the SEC and the Big Ten are going to get.

You've been in the Big Ten. What is there that the league can do? We can't make up 30 or 40, whatever, a million dollars. What can the league do to bridge the gap?

Well, that's part of the things that I was describing. You know, the media piece is a big portion of the overall revenue that's distributed to the institutions. But just the announcement with Endeavor that, by yesterday, we're looking at ticketing for all of our championships in a different way.

It's had an immediate impact as we look at secondary ticket market. And when you give a school 10,000 or 12,000 tickets for a game and then all of a sudden they just kind of run dry at about 9,000 and they have 1,000 or a couple less, instead of selling them for $5 or $10, they come back to this organization and they're able to be distributed in the marketplace and across the ACC footprint and across nationally. So those types of things, the sponsorship with Ally that you just saw, which was tremendous. We've not had a sponsor come forward that has been that committed and is aggressive to sponsoring women's sports. So the opportunity to have the Ally Women's Basketball ACC Championship and then they're also going to support soccer and lacrosse. So those are the things that I'm saying that it's not going to be one decision. It's going to be a combination of a variety of things that you look at. Media, ticketing, sponsorship, NCA revenue, and then how you distribute it.

I think all of that position together gives us the best chance to have long-term success. You and I, when we spoke last at Operation Football, I gave you weird ideas about putting the ACC office in a bus and just driving it around. Here's another weird idea. Completely crazy because you mentioned soccer and it has me thinking.

A merger with the Pac-12 with relegation and promotion. Nah, don't do that. It's interesting though. I'm a big, you know, I've become a big soccer fan. I know, and I love soccer too. It's kind of a cool system, isn't it?

Yeah, you know, it's funny. People think that that would improve soccer in this country. I just don't think you're going to get like big-time sports franchise owners to buy into it. Not here.

It's part of the culture there. All right, last issue for Jim Phillips, the Commissioner of the ACC. And I know I've heard you talk about needing Congress to help out with name, image, and likeness. The NCAA right now is dealing with court issues to whether or not to determine that athletes are employees of the university, which I think all of these things are really tied in. Personally, I don't see Congress doing much to help anybody in this situation. I think they're just going to let it sit where it is. They're not going to use the cliche, they have other important things to do. I just think they're undecided on this too. So, aside from Congress, what can be done in this area?

Or is it just going to be waiting till everything kind of adjusts? Well, you have to try to create your own destiny, so to speak. And so, we do have a few issues. One is what you talked about, the reaffirmation of the student and student-athlete. And some are skeptical of it and don't necessarily believe it and believe with the Alston Award and how we're handling transfer rules and all the rest of it, these are potentially placed. But I would promise you, across our campuses, there's not a single president that doesn't believe that it should start there.

As it relates to Congress, maybe we can have some help, maybe we can't. But in the end, we have this name, image, and likeness issue that I think it's fantastic for student-athletes to be able to benefit off of their abilities or their name or their image, etc. Social media, right. That's right. That's our country.

That's what I think we all really appreciate and have loved about it, the entrepreneurial thing that comes with any of us. And why would we allow a teacher or a faculty member or a president or a commissioner to do it and we wouldn't let a student-athlete? So, I'm completely for it. But for the first time that I can recall, and maybe it's a long time in the history of the NCAA, we've all agreed on a certain set of rules, Adam.

And we may not have liked them, but we agree on them, disagree on it. But we're held to a standard that if you don't abide by that, then you're not going to be able to abide by the standard that if you don't abide by that particular rule, then there's potential ramifications, right? You get in front of the infractions board and they look at it.

You can see Miami got a little slap on the wrist, but yeah, they were called on the carpet. This is one that's just a Herculean issue in the sense that there are no boundaries or no interpretations of what a student-athlete can do. It can vary from line in the same state. It's not even the same. And then we have in our footprint 15 schools, 10 states, and they're different. So, when you go on the road to recruit and to talk about coming to a particular institution and what you're able to do versus what someone else is able to do, it's just completely different.

So, what am I saying? What I'm coming back to is we need to have something that allows us some guard rails and some rules relative to what is permissible and what's not. And that's really been what's difficult. And the Miami situation, I think they felt like everything was in the clear and that things were being done appropriately. So, it's really handcuffed the NCAA from any type of enforcement because they're not quite sure and neither are our schools, not only in our conference, but in a lot of the conferences. So, that's where maybe it's going to fall on deaf ears and Congress has an awful lot of really important things going on, but we have to make that case. We just have to because they're the ones initially that obviously struck down some of the rules previously.

So, they kind of left us out there with their interpretation of what should be permissible and what shouldn't be. And we're hopeful that at least we can get some, at minimum, some guidance from them, if not some type of legislation that everybody across the country could go by and abide by. So, we'll see what happens. I am optimistic about our new president, Charlie Baker. I think he understands the political... He does. ...of this.

And so, he's going to go to work quickly as he just began a week ago on March 1st. And so, we'll see where it goes. But I would say in totality here, college athletics means a lot. It's worth fighting for.

Sure. It's besides the GI Bill and the history of our country, there's not been another segment of the population, i.e. student athletes, that have benefited more from access and affordability to higher education through sport.

So, I think $3.6 billion of scholarship or grant needs have been provided for those 500,000 student athletes. We can't lose sight of that because some of those individuals would never have had a chance to come to college. And we believe that in our country. We believe in the education system. So, I'm going to fight for it and do whatever I can to get us to a place where it's not going to look like maybe last year or 10 years ago. And that's okay.

We got to move on and modernize college sports, but also have a little bit of differentiation from professional sports. When you start hearing those sounds, you know spring is coming. And with the Home Depot's countdown to spring, now is the time to get ready with savings in every aisle. Like Vigoro premium wood mulch with a new lower price of three bags for just $10. Fight weed, maintain soil moisture, and give your walkways, flower beds, and lawn a well detailed look with red, brown, or black mulch. Make the most of the season with savings on all your spring projects at the Home Depot.

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See capitalone.com for details. The Commissioner of the Atlantic Coast Conference, Jim Phillips. There is a lot of ideal, a kind of a utopia of college sports there. There's a lot of that in Jim Phillips and there's room for that in college sports. There's a lot of room for it in college sports. The truth of the matter is that it's a very, very difficult balance to kind of, you know, have because first and foremost, college sports is about, not first and foremost, but what it's become is college sports is about revenue and making as much money as you possibly can off the athletes. And if you're not crazy about the way that sounds, I mean, that's just a reality. You're trying to maximize as much revenue as you can off the athletes.

I mean, it's just one of those things. You have to understand that that is the hard truth about college sports. But if they're going to be encompassed in college, there has to be a college element.

So I get all of that. But that doesn't mean that the collegiate model, which has nothing to do with actual college, the collegiate model is simply about the athletes not getting compensated. In other words, donating their time in exchange for the free education, which would be fine if the free education in all cases was an education and we know better.

So that kind of, that is gone. So if we're about revenue, we have to be about allowing the players to get as much revenue as they can get. I've never understood why the college industry balked at third parties compensating their players. The alternative, and we may be heading there, is the colleges will be compensating the players. That's where we're headed.

Unless the colleges can figure out a way to allow the third parties to do all of that financial work for them. Balking against it, looking for guardrails, all of those things. I just don't understand why. Nobody has guardrails on coaches. Nobody has guardrails on schools.

Nobody has guardrails on schedules. We keep adding games. We keep adding things. We keep adding travel. We keep adding days, but we don't do anything for the athletes. And then we get mad when they get paid by a third party.

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