Jim Phillips highlights benefits of coast-to-coast ACC membership, addresses concerns

There are plenty of challenges associated with having a conference with teams on both the East coast and West coast. However, ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips believes that there are also some benefits.

Phillips highlighted some of those benefits on Monday as the ACC Football Kickoff event got underway, sharing that having so many different time slots available for games to be televised is a plus.

“Being in multiple time zones is really good from a programming standpoint and we’re excited about what that looks like. So we’ve had conversations with [ESPN] and our internal people have done a really good job with some of the folks up in Bristol,” Jim Phillips said.

“It’s almost unlimited when you think about, not only do you have a great partner in ESPN, but you have your own network, one of only three, where you can do it for a variety of sports – different time zones, kickoff or first pitch or the 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 noon for football, all the way up to that late game on Saturday night.”

While Phillips acknowledged some positives, he also didn’t shy away from some of the challenges. With some athletes regularly traveling from coast-to-coast, it can be difficult on students both from a physical standpoint and with academics.

“I think one of the components we have to continue to look at is what’s it doing from a student-athlete standpoint. And honestly we spent a lot of time on that. We really did. And 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. So you can’t get all kinds of opinions about it,” Phillips said.

“But having some parameters about when you travel in one direction or another, not maybe having another trip out there for another year for the current teams, and then maybe having that off week come after that  – in both ways. Sometimes when it’s Cal, Stanford or SMU coming to the East. So again, feel good about where that’s at and feel like we can really have some great platforms on the ACC Network, on ESPN, [ESPN2], ABC, etc.”

Phillips added that he was assured by the new members of the ACC in Cal, Stanford and SMU that they were perfectly fine with the scheduling and traveling aspect as they join the league.

“We were very clear with the three new schools about what would be the reaction, what would be the feeling, because 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,” Jim Phillips said. “And they were obviously very enthusiastic about it, etc. So depending on what sport it is it’ll vary about the number of trips going East to West or West to East.”