Clemson football: ACC sits idle while college football landscape changes around them

While the landscape of college athletics continues to shift, the ACC stands pat.

Perhaps you’ve heard that USC and UCLA are headed to the Big 10 in 2024 and Texas and Oklahoma are going to the SEC in 2025.

Meanwhile, the ACC is…likely figuring out who it’s next “alliance” is going to be with (could you feel my eye roll?) and how all this realignment of football powers impacts basketball and field hockey.

Admittedly, I’m not smart enough to figure out the best move, but I also don’t get paid to do so like Jim Phillips does.

At a time when forward thinking is needed and the PAC-12 hired a media executive as their commissioner and the Big 12 has hired a sports and entertainment executive as theirs, the ACC is stuck in 1970 and hired an old fashioned athletics administrator.

The other conferences see the value in hiring outside of the box – hiring people with years of experience dealing with television and streaming deals – while the ACC continues to act like nothing has changed in the sports landscape.

Perhaps this is much ado about nothing.  Perhaps Phillips has some grand plan that will rock the sports world and prove me wrong.

A significant portion of people are saying, but “Notre Dame”, the ACC has Notre Dame, at least in theory.  As an old coach once said, “Not so fast my friend”.

If it’s true that Notre Dame can walk by writing a check, well, the ACCs strongest remaining trump card has just been deemed a fraud.

Also, if you’re a reader of The Athletic, perhaps you saw this gem of a paragraph last week.

"And about that grant of rights — it stretches to June 30, 2036. That agreement binds the schools’ media rights to the conference, and unless it can be broken, it would make the schools worthless to another conference. The Athletic examined conference grant of rights deals — including the ACC’s original deal agreed upon in 2013 — in an analysis of whether these allegedly irrevocable deals can be broken. Short answer: It would be pretty difficult."

Not exactly comforting.

Clemson fans continue to show concern over the the school’s place in the new era of college athletics

I can almost guess the quote coming from the ACC offices. “As the landscape of college athletics continues to shift, we are closely monitoring the situation with our valued media partners and member universities in order to continue to provide the best experience for our student athletes.” Blah, blah, blah.

As one who saw this, or at least something, coming that would obliterate the ACC I’m surely not the only one yelling, “Fire, fire, fire!”.

It sure feels that there’s very little movement from the ACC, that they put all their hope in an alliance that is now shredded beyond repair.

I said it “feels” that way, because we’ve heard nothing.  Of course, we heard nothing about Southern Cal and UCLA moving to the Big 10 either until it was done, so something “could” be in the works.

As a Clemson fan, this doesn’t feel good though.  Not at all.

There is a glimmer of hope though, as the one thing everyone agrees on is that this is not done.

There is more to come.

But the more things happen without the ACC or it’s teams being a part of the happenings the more doubt creeps in.

At every turn of the conference expansion and realignment era, the ACC has been outmaneuvered and outsmarted.

It’s difficult to see how that will change in the near future.