David HaleDec 5, 2025, 07:15 AM ETCloseCollege football reporter.Joined ESPN in 2012.Graduate of the University of Delaware.Follow on X
THERE ARE TWO ways of looking at the situation the ACC faces entering Saturday’s championship game in which Duke, a 7-5 team with multiple losses outside the Power 4, could win the conference and, in doing so, keep the league out of the College Football Playoff altogether.
The first is that it’s simply a quirk of modern college football — sprawling conferences with limited crossover between teams inevitably leading to a scenario where esoteric tiebreakers come into play. The ACC’s system isn’t much different than other conferences, the policy was approved by coaches and ADs, and Duke, for all its flaws, went 6-2 in league play.
The other perspective, however, is that the ACC — for reasons rational, coincidental and, perhaps, metaphysical — attracts the unusual.
Duke’s presence in Charlotte on Saturday (vs. Virginia, 8 p.m. ET on ABC) is a result of a five-way tie for second place in the league, but also, according to a dozen current and former ACC coaches and administrators who spoke to ESPN, a symptom of longstanding problems — issues some coaches and ADs saw coming more than a decade ago — that have put the conference in increasingly difficult circumstances.
The responses varied from relative optimism: “It’s cyclical,” one current coach said. “The portal and NIL definitely were a problem, but revenue sharing will level that back out in the coming years”
To pessimism: “It’s resources,” another current coach said. “The SEC and Big Ten have more to spend on football, and they have big collectives to supplement their cap.”
To frustration: “The league has a basketball-first mentality,” one administrator said. “And it drives me fricking crazy.”
Yes, the narrative. Even in good times, the national perspective is that the ACC is living on borrowed time.
When Phillips was pressed on whether his league was treated fairly — including by its TV partner — during the league’s kickoff event in July, he admitted he has his frustrations but ultimately put the onus on his own membership to change the talking points.
“We were asleep at the wheel for years,” said one administrator, who included his own school as a culprit. “We watched investments, negotiations, people positioning for the future being done while we just sat there and looked around. We weren’t investing in football as a league, when everybody else knew that was the future. And we’re still not.”
FOR MOST OF its history, the ACC, more than any other power conference, reaped major money from men’s basketball. But by the early 2010s, what had been a roughly 50-50 split in revenue shifted hard toward football. Other leagues understood the pivot, according to numerous coaches and administrators who were in the ACC in that era, but the ACC remained steadfastly devoted to hoops.
Two former ACC coaches recalled a meeting in 2014, just after Florida State’s national championship and six years before Phillips would take over as commissioner, in which former Noles coach Jimbo Fisher conveyed an ominous future.
Fisher was one of the handful of ACC coaches eager to go toe-to-toe with the SEC on the recruiting trail, and for years, he won his share of battles. But as facilities at FSU atrophied, staff sizes at SEC schools ballooned, and the competition for elite talent stiffened, he realized the ACC was being lapped by its primary competitor. If the conference didn’t shift its priorities immediately, the ACC risked being left in the dust.
“You could tell there was frustration,” said one of the former coaches who was a part of that meeting. “The ones recruiting against the SEC were starting to get their asses kicked. We all saw this coming.”
Meanwhile, the SEC’s big three (Alabama, Georgia, LSU) and the Big Ten’s (Ohio State, Penn State, Michigan) have each hit the eight-win mark together six times since the ACC last did.
The reason, one coach who has worked across multiple Power 5 leagues said, is the arrivals of Nick Saban at Alabama and Urban Meyer at Ohio State.
Saban and Meyer wielded massive influence and forced huge investments that dwarfed their competition. As a result, the competition — particularly at the top of both leagues — followed suit in an effort to keep up.
It took years before the results of those investments became obvious, but the SEC and Big Ten got a head start.
IN THE ACC, Fisher left Florida State in 2017 in large part out of frustration over the lack of investment. Mario Cristobal came to Miami in 2022 only after promises for massive new influxes of cash. Bill Belichick required a $20 million investment in player acquisition before he accepted the North Carolina job last year, and Virginia Tech used a promised $249 million increase in athletics spending this fall to land James Franklin.
“Virginia Tech has money. Miami found the money. Schools didn’t have the wherewithal,” the coach said. “They were fooling themselves or didn’t have the urgency to compete on that stage.”
In the early years of the NIL era, the ACC was woefully behind, with a number of schools late to develop and fund collectives, and many boosters at elite academic institutions reluctant to supplement what they viewed as a top-tier degree.
Even in the revenue-sharing era, which began in July 2025 and allowed ACC schools to spend directly on player acquisition, the ACC remains behind. SEC and Big Ten schools are able to supplement the $20.5 million revenue-sharing cap through collectives and other NIL avenues, while a few ACC schools aren’t even fully funding their revenue share opportunities.
Coaches who’ve spoken with ESPN on the subject repeated a similar mantra: The best recruits increasingly see the SEC and Big Ten, with more money to spend on facilities, coaching staffs and player acquisition, as the “big leagues,” and the ACC isn’t viewed on the same plane.
That sets up an obvious catch-22: The league with less money to spend then needs to overpay to lure talent.
Between 2013 and 2018 — the year of FSU’s national title to Clemson’s second one — the ACC played even with the SEC on the field, too, with a 32-33 record in cross-conference matchups. Since then, the ACC has gone 25-48 vs. the SEC, including a 9-19 mark by the ACC’s ranked teams.
“You get what you pay for,” a longtime coach said. “The other two leagues we’re always being compared for have better TV contracts and a lot more money. And some universities are really investing more money into their football program.”
“Beyond the dollars and cents — and yes, that matters — but when you get into the passion, that leads into recruiting weekends and talent and competitiveness,” an ACC administrator said. “In the ACC, [rabid support happens] once in a blue moon. In the SEC, it’s there every game, every school. You can feel that. And over the past five, 10 years, that’s started to spin a whole lot quicker, and it’s a part of the competitive gap we’ve seen.”
“[Leadership] just didn’t think they’d get a return on investment,” he said. “And they may have been right.”
But the ACC’s TV deal is set until 2036. Part of the settlement with FSU and Clemson was a drastically reduced financial penalty should a school decide to leave the conference in search of greener pastures. Regulation of NIL benefits has, thus far, been a mixed bag at best.
There is a path forward, but it’s a perilous one. No school, one administrator said, can manage it with a half-hearted approach to success.
Ironically for a league criticized as too focused on basketball, one administrator pointed to increased investment in that sport as a potential harbinger of better times ahead. In the past few seasons, the ACC’s hoops pedigree waned, as a bevy of Hall of Fame coaches exited for retirement. New blood was needed, but also new money. After the league didn’t see the type of success it traditionally has in 2024-25, a number of schools ponied up.
That can happen for football, too, the administrator said, if the same investments follow, only on a broader scale.
It’s a big “if” for a league that has spent much of the past decade short on cash and buried under a mountain of failures, missteps and jokes.
“‘It just means more’ is the slogan in the SEC,” a former coach said. “I can’t even remember what our slogan is.”
FIRST, A REALITY check: The ACC distributes the third-most revenue to its members of any conference, a figure that has doubled over the past decade. The ACC has as many national championships and title game participants in the playoff era as the Big Ten, and more than any league but the SEC since the advent of the BCS championship. The conference is one of three with a fully distributed TV network, had two playoff teams a year ago and has had eight different teams ranked in the AP Top 25 this year alone. Commissioner Jim Phillips has worked to revamp revenue distribution models to better support the biggest brands, and his efforts have widely been commended by the coaches and ADs who spoke with ESPN.
The ACC’s three biggest brands — Clemson, Miami and Florida State — each won at least eight games in 2013, 2015 and 2016. Since then, there has not been a single year in which they all finished with eight or more wins. It’s a problem Phillips has noted often. If the signature teams don’t win, the storylines move elsewhere. Unlike the rise of programs like Indiana and Vanderbilt, when teams like SMU or Virginia have success, the national perspective often suggests it’s the result of a down league, because the ACC’s signature brands haven’t met expectations.
It’s not just the TV deal, however. After media rights, the next biggest revenue stream for most schools is ticket sales, and again, the ACC is lacking. While Clemson, Florida State and Virginia Tech continue to fill large stadiums, the ACC’s larger footprint is defined by smaller, private schools with limited alumni bases and often depressingly small crowds. While several ADs said they had argued in favor of conference expansion for years ahead of Texas and Oklahoma leaving the Big 12 for the SEC, kicking off the latest round of realignment, the ACC waited. Then, largely to secure its own TV deal in case some schools opted to leave, added more small, private schools or underfunded athletics departments in SMU, Stanford and Cal, because they “fit the image” of the ACC’s brand.