John Swofford Interview

The Commissioner of the Atlantic Coast Conference, John Swafford, is now with us.

And Commissioner, your time is always appreciated. And since there's a lot to get to, let's try to make the most of this time, starting with this morning's headline that the NCAA Board of Governors are recommending, is recommending, NIL legislation that would allow for college athletes to sign endorsement contracts. Now, it still needs to be implemented, and they're expecting something like that can happen by January of 2021. Is this something you're in favor of?

Josh, yes, I am. I think it's fundamentally the right move at this given point in time as we modernize college athletics and try to put our student athletes in a place where they can be successful across the board in their various endeavors. And so I do think it's the right move. I also think, right on top of that, that it's a very complex issue in the parameters that will need to go around this. And it's going to be a challenge to manage it for our campuses and for college athletics as well, because, you know, obviously it creates situations that could be of a negative nature from a recruiting standpoint and from an agent involvement standpoint. So it's not a simple step forward. It's a complex one, but I think it's the right one. Is that your biggest concern?

One of compliance, one of enforcement? I think so, yes. You know, at any time, it's a significant change to the collegiate model of intercollegiate athletics in our country. And any time you have a change of this significance and this breadth, you know, it makes people a little nervous, I think.

That's human nature. I'm confident that the enterprise, so to speak, will find the right parameters and be able to manage it. But there's certainly some risk in that side of it. But as I said, I do think it's the right thing to be doing at this given point in time in college athletics to benefit the student athletes. Another headline from this week came yesterday where you announced that the ACC tournament will be returning to Greensboro at the earliest possible point. For those who don't understand, hey, it's been years out that Washington and Brooklyn were on the books.

You can't just simply say, hey, let's push everything back because there's competition, of course, for some of the avenues, especially Barclays Center comes to mind. It seemed to me like this was a no brainer, was it? Well, for me it was, yes.

For the whole league, I don't know that it was necessarily a no brainer. I think it was absolutely the right thing to do when you consider what Greensboro has meant to this league and to the ACC men's basketball tournament over the years and all of the history and tradition that has been made during our tournament at the times that it has been in Greensboro and the tremendous hospitality shown our schools and players and fans and the good people at the Greensboro Coliseum. For this year's tournament that went to end the way it did, I felt really badly for a lot of people, starting with our athletes, our players, and our coaches, and of course the fans there, but my heart bled for Greensboro as well because this is personally my home. It has been for 23 years now and where the conference was founded and where we live every day. We needed to come back here and we needed to do it as quickly as we could and I was very pleased that our athletic directors and faculty representatives who vote on that matter were willing to step up with a little nudging and make a decision sooner than we normally would have. We probably would have been doing something later in the summer possibly, but just to make certain that we were coming back ASAP, so to speak, to Greensboro. We haven't spoken to you since the ACC tournament and everything that happened, so let's go back to Thursday, March the 12th.

You have the press conference saying, hey, we're going to try and play the games and then it was just surreal being near the floor and seeing Clemson and Florida State warming up and all the other leagues there pulling the plug, the Big East actually got a half in. Where does that day rank in terms of some of the crazier days you had to manage in your position 20 plus years as the commissioner of the Atlantic Coast Conference? It's number one. And that's the list.

Number one is not a good thing. That was an extraordinarily challenging day and several days, in fact, and things were changing the first of the week. They're sort of changing daily. By the time of that Thursday when we decided to not finish the tournament, things were changing literally hourly with information that was coming in that helped us make those kinds of decisions. I was in constant touch with my colleagues at the A5 conferences, as well as Val Ackerman, who's the commissioner of the Big East Conference and a good friend and a Virginia graduate, by the way. Our athletic directors, we were in constant touch with them.

Our president's the same for about a three-day period there. So I had really hoped when we started the tournament that we would be able to finish it and finish it in a normal fashion. But we had that abbreviated period where we decided to continue without fans and only essential people that needed to be there for the games. Unfortunately, we weren't able to do that as well.

But you used the right word, in my opinion. It was a surreal experience and one that you never imagined that you will have when you're standing on the floor of the Greensboro Coliseum and making an announcement that the tournament is over on Thursday with two teams that were out there and ready to play. I went to the dressing room area and spoke with both coaches and their athletics directors. They handled it extraordinarily well. Brad and Leonard both. We had an impromptu presentation of the trophy to Leonard and the Florida State team that had won the regular season and would have been our top-rated team probably going into the NCAA tournament had it occurred and moved on.

But it was a very strange and odd experience. I do appreciate Clemson being there as well, seeing them stay on the floor. Brad Brownell and all of them applaud Florida State. Brad was fantastic. As I said, both Brad and Leonard both were just disappointed, obviously, but understanding and outstanding in how they dealt with it. In fact, I thanked Brad before giving Leonard the trophy because they didn't have to remain out on the floor. But Brad wanted his team to do that.

So, you know, a class class move there, which is not unusual. And then the same with Leonard, ACC Commissioner John Swafford with us here on Sports Hub Triad. So before you were the commissioner of the ACC, you were the director of athletics at North Carolina. Roy Williams joining us earlier in the show today. How take me back to when you first started in Chapel Hill, because it was a year before Michael Jordan arrived in 1981 and all week long with the last Dance Donkey series that's been running on ESPN. We've been getting a bunch of different angles on the Michael Jordan story. Do you remember the first time meeting?

Who would have been called at that time, Mike Jordan? Yes, I met him very briefly when he was in Chapel Hill on a recruiting visit. And little did I know at that point in time what he would become, both in Chapel Hill and later on. And we still visit periodically, you know, in his role in Charlotte, when we're talking with Charlotte about an ACC tournament coming there. I always have the opportunity to visit with him during those conversations.

He's in Florida an awfully lot now, but in Charlotte, plenty. And so it's been, you know, when you're in college athletics and you see someone like Michael and coaches see this all the time, but that you meet as a senior in high school and then watch the involvement as an athlete and as a person, a human being, that's really what it's all about. Those are the things that you appreciate the most, I think, because of the personal aspects of it. Anybody that was ever associated with Michael, you're very proud of him, very proud about how he has developed off the court as well as on the court. And one thing, I always tell people this, I've been around a lot of competitive people, as you can imagine. When you spend a career in sports, you're around a lot of competitive people. The two most competitive people I've ever been around are Dean Smith and Michael Jordan. And I know a lot of people didn't always think of Dean quite that way because of the gentlemanly manner in which he always handled himself. But he was an incredible competitor and the only one I know that maybe taught Michael, that's like 1 and 1A. And one of the things that comes across very obviously in the ESPN series that's going on now is that competitiveness.

Obviously, as a player, the one thing that he cared about was winning and what helped a team win. And so, you know, it's fun to see. Fun to see.

And in your time as an AD, you got a chance to see him win with Dean Smith, one title, of course, in New Orleans back in 1982. It's just fantastic to catch up with you, Commissioner Swafford. I know you're hunkered down in Greensboro, and we're really hoping that things are going to get back on schedule with some level of normalcy sometime soon. Thank you so much for filling us in on everything that's going on. It's appreciated. Josh, great to be with you. Take care of yourself.

Thank you, likewise. That is John Swafford, the commissioner of the Atlantic Coast Conference. A lot to dissect there. We will do that. Get to some of the stuff Roy Williams had to say as well. Also, we're closing in on Wake Forest making a basketball hire. So I'll rank all the candidates who are being discussed. We're doing all of that next on The Drive.