Read forensicbuzz’s comment. He states there’s good, better, best in a conference, even Mississippi State, to use your example … is making bank by being an SEC member. And they have a helluva record in baseball,
Not entirely true. When GT joined the ACC is was pretty much an 8 team basketball conference. It’s No 3 in P5 football, doubled in size, and added FSU and Miami with the expectation they would continue to win. Both collapsed.
He said garbage, mediocre, and pretty strong, but that doesn't change my point that no matter how much money they get they are still losers at football. Always have been, always will be.
We have a fan attendance problem. This year in FB and BB will tell a lot if we are actually making progress in fan attendance for both major sports.
I have to say that when we added Miami and VT, I think 12 years after we added FSU, I thought that we'd hit a home run and that the ACC was going to be an absolute powerhouse conference. Remember, when Miami was announced as joining, they were only one year beyond their 2001 national championship. How could anyone have foreseen Miami's collapse? And FSU also collapsed as well, when they were just a few years beyond their glory days.
I didn’t know we were talking 40 years ago. I’ll amend my statement then - the last 15 years the ACC leadership has done nothing to push the ACC forward. In fact, they have gotten out hustled at every turn by those leaders who think about the future and not the present. I’m not that mad at Phillips. He simply took a promotion and is collecting a check until he goes back to the BIG. It was Swofford who killed the ACC. Phillips is just the guy who gets to make the death notifications and then make the funeral arrangements. At least FSU and Clemson see whats coming.
TBH, I don’t know.
You could put Greg Sankey in charge of the ACC and it wouldn’t change much. The simple fact is that the ACC, by comparison, doesn’t have the fanbase or institutional support that other conferences do. Until schools decide that athletics are important, there won’t be a lot of progress.
That was exactly my point - he's like Bobinski aka Bobinsquatch, nobody's really seen or heard from him. Might as well not exist.
I don’t know that this is fair, but that’s just it… we don’t know. TBH, I am not at all sure what he could have done. The ESPN contracts wee all signed before he arrived. What do you think he could have done?
Look for other ways to generate revenue for the conference? Champion/promote/market the conference and it's members? The ACC's image is horrible, not because of the actual product on the field but because of how the ACC allows it to be perceived. Although I don't think it's necessarily lawsuit-worthy, he comes across as very soft and his response to FSU being snubbed from the playoff was basically "that's crazy, but okay we accept your decision". Compared to Sankey who was actively promoting his conference all the time and lobbying for Bama's inclusion, Jim Phillips was basically silent.
The ACC members—and fan bases for that matter—haven’t been aligned. there’s not much you can do when there isn’t common purpose.
Totally disagree. Sankey would have had a major press conference with every ACC AD standing behind him and would have railed against his undefeated conference champ being left out. You know? Because we all knew it was coming and Sankey would have been prepared with his response. What we got from Phillips was a tweet and a white flag.
Yes, repeating again, the SEC was vociferous and forceful saying no matter what happens in the coming conference championships “you better include at least one SEC team in the playoff or else.”
Of course we have a fan attendance problem, all you have to do is watch one of our games on TV to know that, it goes with what I talked about in my previous listing in this thread. I believe that will get taken care of in due time with what I see we're trying to do, I'm not looking at this year to tell me whether we will get it corrected or not, for me that would be foolish. What we're trying to do will not get done in one or two years, I'm expecting it to take roughly 5 years ( that's my uninformed estimate) in the meantime we will be building a winning program which I see going on now.
Jim is and always will be a behind-the-scenes negotiator. He is not going to be a hell-raising media hog. It's not how he operates. Now, whether the ACC needs one or the other is a wholly different question. But, you're not going to get a bombastic, orator preaching ACC to the media and the world.
Is there a marketing group in the ACC office. If Phillips can't do it, then hire someone that can.
It sounds like we hired the wrong guy for the position then and Phillips should have been hired for a more behind the scenes role. The conference commisioner is the mouthpiece for every conference, that person needs to speak up.