CHARLOTTE — ACC commissioner Jim Phillips took a victory lap Tuesday, telling reporters at the ACC Kickoff media days that the league is in a strong position despite the ever-increasing power of the Big Ten and SEC.
Phillips said he’s never felt as positive about the ACC as he has in the last five months, following the settlements of lawsuits with Florida State and Clemson. The schools, which were suing to try and leave the ACC, negotiated new exit fees that would cost $165 million in 2026, but decrease by $18 million every year until 2030–2031, when they’ll level off at $75 million.
“We want to take another step this year, the league is situated nicely right now,” Phillips said. “Difficult, bumpy, challenging, but let’s not let a lazy narrative from a standpoint of people not moving on and understanding kind of where we’re going. I feel like the league has earned that. Nobody gave that to us.”
Phillips touted the ACC’s steadiness during the legal fights with FSU and Clemson. “You didn’t see us at all move this way or that way,” he said. “People said a lot of things about the league, but at the end of the day, that’s where we’re at, and exercised our partnership with ESPN—which everybody said was not going to happen—through 2035–36, which gives us a platform of the ACC for the next decade.”
Despite the developments around FSU and Clemson, the threat of more conference realignment persists throughout college football. “I have a responsibility to make sure that our ACC schools want to be in this league, not just have to be in this league,” Phillips said.
As part of the settlements, the ACC will distribute more media-rights revenue to schools that have the highest TV ratings, on top of an adjusted performance-based revenue distribution model that the conference debuted this past year.
