While FSU and Clemson try to bolt ACC, commish Jim Phillips offers stern rebuke and says league is ‘inside that top three’

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Inside a small second-floor board room of a Hilton hotel on Monday, Jim Phillips escapes, at least temporarily, from the bustle of the opening day of his league’s media days.

Seated at the head of the table, Phillips, the ACC commissioner, gestures toward the four loose pages before him that bear out his conference’s superlatives.

Seven different ACC schools, for instance, won team NCAA championships this year to go with the 16 won the previous two years. The three-year total of 23 titles leads all conferences. The ACC, too, leads all power conferences in several rankings, including the U.S. News & World Report, NCAA graduation rates and NCAA academic performance figures.

The list goes on. The league brought in a record $700 million in total revenue last year and distributed $45 million each to its members — the third-most in the country. And, finally, the ACC is home to two of the three active head football coaches to have won a national championship and has won the second-most CFP titles of any conference in the past decade.

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To Phillips, those questioning whether the ACC is the third-best conference in college athletics behind the SEC and Big Ten need look no further than the list before him.

“We are not chasing third. By any metric of significance — CFP appearances, national championships, having our own network, revenue generation, academic prowess — I’m comfortable where the ACC is: inside that top three,” he told Yahoo Sports in an interview Monday.

Not long before that, Phillips, often of mild-temperament and mostly uncontroversial, opened this four-day event in Charlotte with an hour-long impassioned, and at times, brazen speech about the state of the ACC.

He blistered Florida State and Clemson for their “disruptive and…

Source link : https://ca.sports.yahoo.com/news/while-fsu-and-clemson-try-to-bolt-acc-commish-jim-phillips-offers-stern-rebuke-and-says-league-is-inside-that-top-three-000626179.html

Author : Yahoo Sports

Publish date : 2024-07-23 00:06:26

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