No chronicle of Jim Phillips’ first five years as ACC commissioner is complete without mention of the “near-existential” crises — external and internal, none of his own creation — that have marked his tenure. And we’ll get to those momentarily.
But first, courtesy of those who collaborate with him almost-daily on the treasured-but-troubled industry of college sports, a glimpse into how he operates — professionally and personally.
Virginia Tech athletic director Whit Babcock and Phillips go back more than two decades, to when both were rising through the fundraising ranks. When Phillips succeeded John Swofford at the ACC five years ago this month, Babcock was a natural ally, the AD at one of the conference’s leading football brands.
But 2025 was a slog in Blacksburg as football cratered and the university fired head coach Brent Pry three games into the season. Some fans wanted Babcock, 0 for 2 on football hires after the abbreviated tenures of Justin Fuente and Pry, dismissed as well.
As Babcock retreated from public view, Phillips, a former athletic director at Northern Illinois and Northwestern, offered constant encouragement. A serial texter, Phillips often sent Bible verses.
“Don’t make me emotional on that one,” Babcock said, his eyes welling. “He was fabulous. Even when times aren’t tough, when you win a basketball game or lose a basketball game, I don’t know when that guy sleeps. But he knows what every one of your teams is doing, texts all the time. So yeah, he’s a good man. He’s a great man. Walks the walk and talks the talk.”
NCAA President Charlie Baker was less than a year on the job in December, 2023, when he attended the Men’s College Cup soccer championship game in Louisville, Kentucky. The combatants were the ACC’s Notre Dame and Clemson.
There in sub-freezing temperatures, Baker and Phillips talked about the enterprise that both are charged with guiding. What most struck Baker was Phillips’ detailed knowledge about both teams and schools, especially the athletes themselves.
“It was just very clear to me that he really knew his way around his community,” said Baker, a former governor of Massachusetts who understands more than most that all politics is local.
The father of two former Division I athletes, Phillips began building that foundation immediately at the ACC, touring all 15 campuses during the spring of 2021, and shadowing him at Virginia Tech and Virginia, I saw him interact with presidents, administrators and coaches.
But he was most engaged with the athletes he met, the topics ranging from NCAA legislation to social justice. He collected their contact information, remains a staunch advocate of the ACC’s Student-Athlete Advisory Council and is omnipresent at league championships and football contests.
“That allows you to think how your decisions will affect the daily lives of the student-athletes,” Baker said. “He’s totally about the student-athlete experience at his core.”
‘Empathy and perspective’
When he became a first-time athletic director in December 2021, Clemson’s Graham Neff was charged with managing a football coach, Dabo Swinney, who in the previous seven seasons had steered the Tigers to six ACC titles and two national championships. Neff held Phillips, a three-time national Athletic Director of the Year, in equally high regard.
Four-plus years later, that admiration hasn’t waned.
“There is (an) empathy and perspective that Jim brings when we’re trying to navigate things from a campus lens that I know we all appreciate,” Neff said of his AD peers. “When you overlay that to all the aspects of commissioner roles these days, the business aspect, the traditional blocking and tackling of (daily operations), let alone now all the big-picture industry stuff: House (antitrust) case, College Football Playoff, (lobbying) Congress. Him having sat in these chairs, that certainly allows him to connect and lead our AD room in a really unique way.”
Those all-encompassing obligations make Phillips’ nonstop travel to ACC competitions all the more impressive to Neff.
“Broad-based sports, a lot of Olympic sports success: It all matters in the ACC,” Neff said, “and it all matters to Jim, and that’s an overlap of what the ACC is and who Jim is as a commissioner. That’s not forced. The cross country championships matter, and he wants to be there because they matter to the ACC.”
‘Faith and family’
Of the 15 ACC presidents and chancellors who selected Phillips as commissioner, Virginia Tech’s Tim Sands is among only three who remain in their posts — Duke’s Vince Price and Georgia Tech’s Angel Cabrera are the others — churn that underscores how nimble commissioners must be.
Even the three schools that the ACC welcomed less than two years ago after a contentious expansion debate — Stanford, SMU and Cal Berkeley — have since changed not only presidents, but also athletic directors. Moreover, 10 other conference members have transitioned to new ADs during Phillips’ tenure.
“It is an incredibly challenging and delicate (task) to build these relationships, or maintain them, during stressful times,” Sands said. “His strengths are really his grounding in faith and family foremost. That’s his basis. …
“I’ve watched him up close now, in all sorts of environments, including with the NCAA, and he just has an inherent way of understanding the other person’s viewpoint and finding a solution. That’s not a common capability. It’s very rare. But he’s very good at it.”
The first commissioner ever selected to chair the NCAA Board of Governors — his two-year term leading the association’s most influential board began last August — Phillips inherited turbulent times replete with unchecked athlete compensation and transfer freedom.
He’s used to it.
Less than two months after joining the ACC, Phillips presided over a pandemic-marred men’s basketball tournament in which reigning NCAA champion Virginia and five-time national champ Duke had to withdraw due to positive COVID tests.
During his first ACC Kickoff, the conference’s annual gathering for teams, media and bowl partners, news broke that Texas and Oklahoma were departing the Big 12 for the SEC, unsettling leaders throughout the industry.
And that was just the start.
Creative and modern
“Life has never been about a straight path,” Phillips said. “It winds itself back and forth, and that’s what we’ve experienced. No different than any other conference. Of course there’s been unexpected issues, but you try to work through that and try to stay steady and calm and strategic and you stay clear about where you’re trying to go.
“But I’m proud of what we’ve done over five years. And that’s not me. … It’s about what we’ve done collectively.”
Indeed, Phillips and his staff, in concert with campus leaders, shepherded the league’s move from Greensboro to Charlotte, a shift in which the ACC exited its founding city for a more corporate and cosmopolitan base. He augmented his Charlotte team with an in-house general counsel (Pearlynn Houck), chief revenue officer (Anthony Macri) and chief marketing and brand officer (Marques Zak).
ACC commissioner Jim Phillips is interviewed during the ACC Men’s Basketball Tipoff in October. (Courtesy/Nell Redmond/ACC)
The ACC and ESPN last year exercised an option that extends their partnership through 2036. One month later, the conference and its most valuable football brands, Clemson and Florida State, settled dueling lawsuits that challenged the league’s exit fee and grant of media rights.
Neff applauds Phillips for compartmentalizing the legal conflicts and still valuing every school’s input on all conference matters, from expansion to scheduling.
The court entanglements “never got personal,” Neff said. “But (our relationship has) always been personal — in a really good way.”
As part of the settlement, the ACC adopted a concept, pushed by FSU and Clemson, that distributes television revenue to schools based primarily on football viewership. This on the heels of a “success initiative” that rewards the top performers in football and men’s basketball with larger shares of postseason windfalls, both innovations counter to the industry-wide, decades-old practice of equal distributions.
The changes were rooted in the conference’s long-term ESPN deal, signed in 2016, that lags considerably behind the television revenues amassed by the Big Ten and SEC.
“I really commend Commissioner Phillips for that,” Babcock said. “I believe it stabilized the league. I believe it got the distraction out of the way of the lawsuits with Clemson and Florida State. Certainly it encourages schools to invest more in football. It should strengthen our brand. I would be shocked if other leagues don’t adopt a similar model.
“If you have a great year, you’re right there with the revenue distribution of the SEC and the Big Ten, if not higher. Very creative and very modern.”
‘Validating moment’
Athletes and coaches win games, not commissioners and league offices, but on Phillips’ watch, the ACC has continued to thrive competitively, while maintaining its academic luster. The ACC’s 31 NCAA team championships since 2021-22 are the most of any conference in its sponsored sports, most recently this fall with NC State women’s cross country and Florida State women’s soccer.
The ACC has not won a football or men’s basketball national title since Virginia hoops in 2019, the longest such drought in more than three decades and a void that eats at Phillips. But progress is afoot.
Led by Duke, men’s basketball is positioned to double its four NCAA Tournament bids from last season, and Miami football advanced to last month’s national championship game, where it dropped a stirring contest to undefeated Indiana.
With their run, the Hurricanes pounced on the ACC’s success and viewership models, earning more than $30 million north of the conference’s baseline revenue distribution for 2025-26.
“It was another validating moment for the conference in a lot of ways,” Phillips said. “We’ve done it in a lot of different sports, but most recently we had not done it in football. And to have another institution (other than Clemson and Florida State), showed folks who hadn’t been paying attention. There was no disputing how Miami performed.”
After a 2-11 postseason flameout in 2024, the Hurricanes’ three playoff victories and the ACC’s 9-5 postseason — 7-3 versus the Power Four and 4-0 against the SEC — was a desperately needed jolt.
Another part of football’s resurgence: Armed with the resources to acquire top-end talent, Virginia authored the first 11-win season in program history. Meanwhile in Blacksburg, Virginia Tech administrators earmarked $229.2 million in additional campus support for athletics during the next four years, a commitment that helped the Hokies land the accomplished James Franklin as their next coach.
“You can see a lot of institutions making the investments based on the new (revenue-sharing) models, which I think will lead us back to strength in football and certainly basketball,” Sands said. “You’re starting to see the results of that this year. I think with Jim we’ll continue to be nimble and strategic and forward-thinking. That’s our best survival strategy, just to always be on that edge and not sitting back and watching things happen.”
David Teel: Virginia Tech board goes all-in on Hokies with $229.2 million infusion
Missteps? Sure, as in any endeavor. And while declining to offer specifics, Phillips said “you could write a book” on the ACC’s.
A wonky football tiebreaker, which the ACC shared with its Power Four peers, locked 10-2 Miami out of the league championship game this season in favor of 7-5 Duke. Phillips has vowed a revision and advocated for a uniform FBS procedure.
The ACC’s 2021 Alliance with the Big Ten and Pac-12 was ill-fated, witness the Big Ten plundering the Pac-12 for USC and UCLA less than a year later. The Big Ten’s subsequent poaching of Oregon and Washington crumbled the Pac-12 and prompted the ACC’s additions of Cal, Stanford and SMU.
When the Big Ten and SEC threatened to split from the Bowl Subdivision, the ACC and seven other FBS conferences agreed to cede not only 58% of future College Football Playoff revenue to the Big Ten and SEC, but also sole control of future playoff models.
So even though nine of 10 conferences publicly support expanding the field from 12 to 16 teams, Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti’s preference for 24 created a stalemate that leaves next season’s CFP at 12 teams.
“I was and I am disappointed that we couldn’t come together to get to 16,” Phillips said, “and I certainly share in the responsibility.”
Phillips, Petitti, the SEC’s Greg Sankey and Big 12’s Brett Yormark, along with their legal teams, were central to the settlement of three antitrust cases, collectively known as House, that last year gave Division I schools the option of sharing up to $20.5 million in revenue annually with athletes. The agreement created an enforcement arm, the College Sports Commission, that in the eight ensuing months has shown little bite.
Meanwhile, many coaches, agents, athletes and boosters work to circumvent the House guidelines, a predictable development that nonetheless offends Phillips’ old-school sensibilities.
“It’s on the national leadership,” he said. “It’s on the conference commissioners. It’s on the coaches, the athletic directors, student-athletes. It’s on all of us as it relates to having the ability to hold ourselves accountable for our actions.
“There is no restraint whatsoever, as it relates to rules, as it relates to tampering, as it relates to circumvention of those rules. It just has to stop. It just does. And everyone’s waiting for this seminal moment where the CSC is fully running and we have our participant agreement and (CEO Bryan Seeley) has got a staff completely together. And they’re waiting for other things in the ecosystem to occur. But what about doing what we all know is the right thing?”
‘Trust is the most important thing’
Yet for all the warts and issues, Phillips is incurably upbeat about college sports and the ACC.
“We knew he had strong skills and experience coming in,” Sands said, “but I don’t think any of us, the presidents involved in that hiring decision, had any idea how many challenges we would have in close succession, and near-existential type challenges.
“He’s always an optimist, to the point where he realizes the landscape is telling him to pivot. I like that attitude. But when reality sets in and you see what’s stacked up in front of you, you’re not shy about making a big change.”
From expansion to revenue distribution, Phillips has steered massive change in the ACC, an 18-member, coast-to-coast league with a diversity of public and private institutions unrivaled among the Power Four.
Clemson, Florida State and North Carolina opposed the expansion from 15 to 18 members, but Cal, Stanford and SMU — the latter’s football and men’s basketball programs have been immediately competitive — are projected to incrementally add $600 million in revenue to ACC coffers.
Many schools resisted the new revenue-sharing model, but from all accounts, the approach has altered behaviors, mindsets and strategies.
“If you have a diverse group that you’re trying to lead and manage,” Baker said, “the most important thing you need from all of those folks is for them to believe you get where they’re coming from. Trust is the most important thing you have to have.
“The thing you don’t want in a complicated organization is for people to say what they think they’re supposed to say rather than what they believe. With Jim’s personality and the way he works, I think people tell him what they believe, whether it’s what he wants to hear or not.”
Growing up in Chicago with his nine siblings, Phillips learned people skills and the art of listening at a young age. So even as Clemson and Florida State sued the ACC, fueling questions about the league’s long-term viability, he listened to their concerns.
Most telling, he convinced the conference’s other presidents to address those concerns.
No one envisioned those internal crises, or the industry’s current state, on Feb. 1, 2021, Phillips’ first day on the job. And as he voluntarily acknowledges, who knows where college athletics will head in the next five years.
“But the ACC is strong, healthy and well-positioned,” Phillips said. “All indicators tell us that. I think we’re flourishing in this modernization of college athletics.”
That enthusiasm is contagious.
“That attitude and positivity, there’s some force of will to that in some regard,” Neff said. “I think how Jim leads with that from his chair has had some level of calming effect and progressive effect that we see throughout all the league’s sports. He wears that, and it’s genuine and who he is, and you can’t help but want to support and be part of the solutions with him because of how he goes about it.”
David Teel, david.teel@virginiamedia.com
