When no news is breaking news: UNC AD feels need to tell staff Tar Heels aren’t leaving ACC
Even before it was official that Oregon and Washington were fleeing the wreckage of the Pac-12 for the Big Ten, it had been such a crazy week in the no-holds-barred world of conference realignment — thanks in large part to the constant yipping out of Tallahassee — that North Carolina athletic director Bubba Cunningham held a call with his department Friday morning to tell them UNC was not leaving the ACC.
That’s what passes for breaking news these days in college sports. Nothing is actually something.
“When the news cycle starts spinning like this, I have the obligation to let our staff know what I know and reassure them we’re going to be OK,” Cunningham said later Friday. “That I value what they do. That the university values what they do. That’s my role, to reassure them that things are going to be fine.”
And as for UNC?
“We have a $137 million budget,” Cunningham said. “We have 285 employees. Eight hundred student-athletes. We’re going to host 200 events this year. Over a million people are going to come to our games. We’re in good shape.”
With the Pac-12 falling apart — Colorado’s already left for the Big 12, and others are expected to follow suit — and Florida State very loudly claiming it would somehow be better off leaving the ACC, the world of college athletics is being torn apart for the third straight summer, in the service of college football television ratings, for no good reason.
The ACC’s position as third wheel, in terms of revenue if not championships, behind the Big Ten and SEC, always puts a target on its back, despite a grant-of-rights agreement that so far has held the conference together and is likely to continue to do so until it gets closer to its expiration in 2036.
As always, television money is the catalyst. The past two summers, when Oklahoma and Texas left the Big 12 for the SEC and UCLA and USC left for the Big Ten, they did it to squeeze more money out of ESPN and Fox, respectively. This summer, it’s because there’s not any left.
Fox is tapped out and Disney is exploring a “strategic partner” for ESPN as the golden spigot of cable-subscriber fees dries up, so when the Pac-12 went to cut a new deal it found an empty room full of tumbleweeds. The best it could do was Apple TV, at a fraction of what its schools get now. Oregon and Washington decided a partial share of Big Ten money was a better option, no matter what it means for the athletes involved.
Which makes Florida State’s whining all the more funny. The Seminoles already spend more on athletics than any other public school in the ACC, with a total of 23 ACC titles to show for it in the past decade. One of those was literally handed to Florida State – on the floor of the Greensboro Coliseum as COVID hit in 2020 — and more than half of the rest came in men’s and women’s indoor and outdoor track.
If Florida State can’t compete in the ACC spending more than anyone else, how is more money going to help it compete nationally? The problem isn’t that Florida State doesn’t have enough money. It’s that Florida State is bad at this, and trapped in a blind alley of nostalgia from the last time FSU football was relevant, a generation ago.
Friday, news broke that the university was considering a private equity investment to finance an ACC exit. If the Seminoles want to buy their way out of the ACC … fine. Where are they going to go? Start a new conference with all their girlfriends from Canada on a really awesome TV network you’re just not cool enough to know about?
That this is mostly just posturing by the people in charge at Florida State to distract from how bad they are at their jobs doesn’t make it any easier on the rest of the ACC, which for the third straight summer is suddenly fending off rumors of its imminent demise.
And that day may yet come. But with everything else going on, Cunningham felt the need to underline to his staff that it hadn’t come yet.
“The ACC’s a great league for us,” Cunningham said. “We have no plans to leave the ACC. We’re going to strengthen the ACC and do everything we can to make our league as good as we possibly can. We’re going to value what we have. I’m not going to look over my shoulder at what we don’t have.”
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This story was originally published August 4, 2023 at 4:23 PM with the headline "When no news is breaking news: UNC AD feels need to tell staff Tar Heels aren’t leaving ACC."
