Jim Phillips describes the challenge the ACC faces in scheduling coast to coast

Coast-to-coast travel was one of the biggest criticisms that the ACC faced when adding the likes of Stanford, Cal and SMU to its ranks ahead of the 2024 collegiate athletic calendar.

To ACC commissioner Jim Phillips, he feels as though playing conference games across multiple timezones benefits everyone from a programming and national exposure standpoint.

“Our internal people have done a really good job with some of the folks up in Bristol,” Phillips said on Monday at the ACC Media Days. “I think one of the components we have to look at is what is it doing from a student-athlete standpoint. Honestly, we spent a lot of time on that, we really did. It’s unfortunate because when you go through expansion, you’re not able to engage with necessarily student-athletes because it’s at such a high level; it’s at the board level. You can’t get all kinds of opinions about it, right, all the rest of it.

“But we were very clear with the three new schools about what would be the reaction, what would be the feeling. They’re going to be coming to the East Coast more often than our student-athletes are going to have to go to the West Coast. They were very enthusiastic about it.”

Phillips continued, saying that it will ultimately depend on the sport when it comes to coast-to-coast travelling.

However, a positive aspect of their western expansion saw Phillips note that having a parternship with ESPN that provides services such as the ACC Network and ESPN+ at their disposal will help increase the conference’s reach and put more eyes on the ACC than ever before.

“It’s almost unlimited when you think about not only do you have a great partner in ESPN,” he said. “But you have your own network, one of only three, where you can do it for a variety of sports, different time zones, kickoff, first pitch, start of a soccer match, whatever sport you want to use as an example.

“I don’t know that we have it all figured out, only that you’re going to see us from 12:00 in the morning for football, since we’re here at Football Kickoff, 12:00 noon all the way up to that late game on Saturday night.”

The commissioner did call for the conference to have some parameters when it comes to travel. Varying by sport, he pitched an idea for teams to schedule each cross-country placed multiple weeks away from each other. At the end of the day, Phillips feels good about the direction of the conference is going.