The ACC just had their spring meetings, so what now?

Let's bring in our friend, Chip Patterson, CBS Sports.com. College Sports Maven, Cover 3 Podcast moderator, who joins us every Wednesday. How are you, sir? Are you ready?

You have your playoff beard all cranked up? I've got success initiatives, okay? I'm trying to have an initiative to create more success.

We have success initiatives, and honestly, I checked some postseason boxes in the revenue sports, loading up my family and hauling us back from Carteret County. So, listen, you're finding me at a very good time because we have finished the journey, and I'm very glad to be with you. Thank you for your flexibility. No, no.

It's all good. So, that's where I wanted to start. The Atlantic Coast Conference, they just had their spring meetings at Amelia Island, Florida. There was a lot of bluster, a lot of bloviating, a lot of it from Florida State about, this is our brand, our brand is worth this, we're getting this, blah, blah, blah.

And what came out of it was, yeah, nobody's going anywhere because we can't. So, how do we make the football schools, if you will, the ones who are successful, how do we make them happier? Well, they came out with this, the Success Incentive. What do you call it? A success initiative. Yes, a success incentive program.

Gosh, that is so fantastic. Now, all Florida State has to do is back it up. Yeah, just go and win your post-season game, something that Florida State, oh, wait, I'm sorry, I'm checking my records, missed some post-season games during these recent years.

I mean, look. The last seven. When you have Clemson stating that they have been carrying weight in terms of putting the ACC in the spotlight, Clemson is right. Those games that are on in that primetime ABC spotlight, those big games that draw so much attention and end up being one of the four or five most talked about contests when we are wrapping up the night on the Cover Three podcast. Clemson is 100% responsible for that.

Florida State, a little bit less so. And as the week unfolded, and you and I have talked about this a lot, my conclusion was that I don't know if Jim Phillips had to say this, I don't know if somebody else had to say this, but I think that someone walked into the room after everybody was done yelling at each other and erring it out and said, okay, is everybody done? Because no one has a spot to go. You might have your attorneys ready to go, but you don't have an invitation. So what can we do now? And honestly, like that's a more practical and pragmatic approach, which is why I think after that long athletic director meeting, Michael Alford, the athletic director of Florida State, he came out and he had a very different tone. Oh, sure. No, we are thrilled to be in the Atlantic about the idea that, and look on some level, this is, and I heard Graham Neff, the athletic director at Clemson, the way that he proposed it is the way that in a perfect idealistic world, it works, which is in order to achieve that success, you are investing more, because if all the schools that are at the lower end of the investment world do invest more on their own, not just counting on whatever they get from the payout from the ACC, raise more money, spend it in a smart and effective and efficient way, then yes, like things should get better all across the board.

We'll see, you know, we'll see. Because there is the argument that if you only pay out the schools that are doing well, then the schools that are not doing well, they're only going to continue to fall behind. I get that. But where we sit right now in the ACC, this is going to create a little bit more balance in terms of the schools that are drawing the most out of the television contract, being able to get a little bit more from that.

All right. So according to the way this is going to work, though, it's not going to be existing media money. It's going to be whatever the league would take in from postseason play. And normally what happens is that money goes to the league and the league distributes it evenly amongst the 14 or in the case of basketball, 15 member institutions. But that's not the way it will work starting, I guess, the 24-25 season. So if Florida State were to advance to the college football playoff and who knows, win a couple of games and get to the final four, if they're not one of the top four to begin with, then Florida State would get more money from the system that they helped create. So I don't even know what those payouts are going to be. Let's just pretend that you would get $25 million a win. I'm making it up. I have no idea if it's even close to that.

It probably isn't. Go into the league, whatever it is, that maybe Florida State would keep half of the money and the rest would be distributed amongst the league individually. That would be good for Florida State. I don't anticipate it's anywhere close to that amount of money. But again, I'm just making that up.

I can provide some context. So when they ran the analysis of some of the distribution models that led us to this point, there was the opportunity, and I think it was the realistic opportunity for a school to get $5 to $10 million more per year than they would otherwise when everything is split out evenly. And I'm not sure if they took a year where, like for example, Miami, when Miami makes a final four run in basketball, a men's basketball, an elite eight run in women's basketball. Sorry, Mario Cristobal, no money from the football side of things. Okay, so that equals this many units. So Miami would get this many millions of dollars. It is not going to be $30 million closing the gap with some of those from the ABC and the Big Ten, but it is going to be a little bit more that $5 to that $10 million. Those things matter because going back to spending money efficiently and doing it in a smart way, those $5 to $10 million can be the staffing, can be some of the resources that you can put in to help improve everything around your program, whether it is scouting, whether it is your recruiting budget. Those are things that I think we're going to see with some of this postseason money.

Two more things on that. Number one, there's an example out west in the Pac-12 where Washington State is in the middle of a hiring freeze and there was a line in there about, oh no, this is because the Pac-12 payout isn't what we thought, but there's a deeper story there that Washington State did not spend its money well. They did not, quote, accurately keep track of expenditures. So now they're stuck in a financial hole to which I say, and this is basic business that people all across this unprecedented statewide platform can understand, these athletic directors are on tight times. They need to spend money in a smart time. Uh-oh. Speaking of tight times, let me just pick up here. In a way, what Chip is describing is that athletic directors aren't really balancing their checkbooks very well.

Oh, I forgot the last five or six entries. What did I write those checks to? That's what Chip is describing. So obviously in today's age, look, the money that these ADs are taking in, I shouldn't say ADs, the money that the schools are taking in is significantly higher than they were ten years ago. How is it that we can't make ends meet? Chip is back.

Let me just pick it up from here real quick, because I want to get to a few other things. If we go back ten years, when the payouts were significantly less than they are today, you know, the Big Ten wasn't distributing $50 million of revenue ten years ago, how did everybody make it work then? And why can't we make it work now?

Now, we can make it work. The panic is eight years down the line. The panic is when the payments balloon for those other leagues and they just remain stagnant.

No, I understand that. The Big Ten is going to end up with $30 million more per year. But why can't athletic departments make it work with the $35 million they're getting from shared revenue now, when we've been making it work with less ten years ago? There is, I understand, within the athletic director community. While the public statements might fall on both sides of it, there does seem to be a widespread acknowledgement that the way that things are trending, that they need to prepare to take on costs that might not exist.

And I don't know if it's directly player compensation related, but at least something close to that. The winds of change throughout college sports have athletic directors believing that they might have to spend more money than they have been spending just to be able to have the best players in the entire country. Alright, we're going to get to that in the NIL, it's not even a bill, it's a discussion draft, in a second.

This is so silly. But real quick, is what's going on now, what the ACC is proposing in this incentive plan, whatever, is this likely to make anybody legitimately happy? I think that it has allowed for those schools that were grumbling to stop grumbling, and if they stop grumbling, then we'll stop talking about it.

Because we, and I'm including myself in this, we're only making things worse. Because it was a great, you know, the distance between the conversations that were being had, not just with media, but with fans, with people at their offices, with groups of friends, the distance between what they were talking about and the realities of the situation at the spring meetings, it was vast. I mean, that was a huge gap between us spinning out, but between there being content out there where you're already deciding who's going to the Big Ten and who's going to the SEC. You know, like, we just spun it too far down the line in the name of content creation, so stop the content creation, make it a non-story. That alone is at least going to calm the waters, even if deep down there's a ticking clock where a Florida State, a Clemson, and a Miami understand that after X date, it now is financially feasible for us to challenge the grant of rights. And that is simply what we're working towards right now. At some point, the value to get out of the deal will be low enough that it will be worth being able to challenge that and trying to buy your way out.

You don't even have to get out of it. We're 10 years away from an announcement because Texas and Oklahoma had to wait. We're 10 years away from an announcement where whoever is going to leave, and again, you and I agree on this, that there aren't many soft landing spots out there. And, you know, more power to you, Florida State, but I don't see the Big Ten coming for you, and the SEC has no reason to invite you to join their club.

So, I mean, I don't know how many landing spots there are, but in 10 years, schools may just announce that starting in this particular year, we're out. And there is no grant. You don't have to worry about the grant of rights because it would be when everything expired.

All right. In just a couple of minutes, if we could, because I mentioned it, and it is a big deal, even though we're so far away from this being a meaningful document, there is a bill in Capitol Hill in the House of Representatives. It's not a bill. It's a discussion draft, which is a letter outlining what a bill might look like. So we haven't even gotten to the bill writing part of this, which kind of designs a national NIL law.

I'm sure you've read enough about this. They start exactly the way the committee, and it's the same subcommittee that met and discussed this about two months ago, where it was billed how to protect the NIL rights of students when everything said during that hearing was about restricting the NIL rights of students. What are your thoughts on the discussion draft?

So I have not gotten a chance to fully review, you know, the aforementioned pack up your entire family and hoist, you know, hoist them all across the state. My initial, but my surface level, you know, grab it, you know, get one or two sort of expert, you know, cosigns or opinions is that it sounds like the NCAA wrote it. It sounds like all of the lobbying efforts have gone right into writing this.

Which is what happens, actually. Yeah. To the point where it almost, I'm disappointed in our federal government, that you were just so lazy that you're just letting them write. Disappointed in our federal government, Chip? Did you just say that? You're supposed to be great with words and good communicators. That's how you got into this position.

Come on, can you at least write your own words? So to that point, I guess for the NCAA, the millions of dollars you spent on lobbying have at least gotten exactly what you wanted in this document. And so we'll see how much it gets picked apart, changed, or if it even goes anywhere because... Won't go anywhere. If the NCAA is going to get anything, they're not going to get everything. And that's what I feel very certain of. Gosh, it's just disappointing.

It all depends on the level of expectation of our elected officials in Washington. Chip Patterson, I'm glad you're back safe. Hope everybody's well, and I will talk to you next week.

Sounds good, y'all be well. Alright, by the way, see you at game five. Game five. Come on. Game five. Friday night. You got it. That's Chip Patterson.