RE: New ACC commish
I don't have any strong feelings about this guy in particular. I haven't followed his career or anything. Everything I've seen is that he's wildly respected, and it sounds like he would have been the B1G's choice, barring other, let's say political, interests.
If the ACC lands the guy that the B1G's ADs and current office strongly favored...well that's a pretty darn good get. In fact, it can be reasonably claimed that the ACC hired the single best candidate anywhere, other than a sitting conference commissioner. The ACC doesn't exactly have a history of making those kind of moves.
My biggest fear was that the ACC would insist on this hire being a statement of some kind, and narrow the search to someone that would be the first of something. I'm totally cool if the best person for the job also is the first of some group to be a commissioner, it's a great story for everyone if that is the case. But I was concerned that the ACC would be insistent on hiring the first trans female hispanic conference commissioner, and limiting the search to just that. This is too important a hire to place any limitations.
I'm also glad that they didn't go with a TV executive. The premise that "college sports is really a media company" has largely proven a failure. More importantly, I would hope that the conference could get past the idea that ESPN is our friend. ESPN is not our friend, they are our business partner, and it's not remotely the same. The ACC has a long history of mistaking it's partners for family (or literally making it's partners family), to the detriment of all. Hiring a former ESPN exec (no offense Syracuse) would be the mistake of a lifetime. I'm not saying the relationship has to, or should turn, adversarial, but the conference does need to consider its interests independently from ESPN. Which is to say nothing of the fact that I don't know how anyone could particularly look at a current or former ESPN executive and claim that they're inherently masters of the new media. They're struggling along with everyone else, to say the least.
I do think its a positive that they hired someone intimately involved with college athletics and administration with a large amount of gravitas within that community. I like that he's not a Tobacco Road insider, or part of the checkered history of the league office. I like that you most certainly couldn't under any definition, say that he's coming from a basketball school.
However...here's my concerns.
Another Kevin White/Notre Dame guy. FSU has already had their walk around the park with one of those guys, and it was pretty horrendous. I'm far from convinced of the genius of Kevin White. His Notre Dame tenure was an utter disaster for Notre Dame football, and he came to Duke with the greatest basketball coach of all time, and the accompanying money machine, already in place. Yes, he raised Duke football from the worst in the power 5 to a perfectly middling program. That's quite an impressive accomplishment, but I'm not sure that's all that relevant. The future of the ACC is not going to be made on whether BC or Syracuse regularly win 6-7 games. To be honest, I feel like that part of the job has already been kind of done. I think the willingness to accept being utterly awful in football, which plagued the league for decades, has mostly been overcome...for all my complaints, I'm not so sure any ACC program is showing the kind of satisfaction with pitiful results that so long was a problem.
Another guy from a unique, private, well-monied institution that just doesn't have experience in a big, competitive football first public with financial competitiveness concerns. That's where the Clemson president fits the bill obviously. This is probably a defacto problem in perpetuity given the disparate nature of the league, half the members have nothing in common with the other half.
At the end of the day...I'm not sure how much it matters. The massive financial deficit is baked in, between a terrible television deal going back over a decade now, and the lagging of non-television resources. I don't see on what basis you'd possibly get ESPN to reopen the TV deal, short of Notre Dame football membership. I don't think that's likely to happen anytime soon, but if it did, I guess this is probably the kind of guy at the helm that would be most likely to land it.
I think the first thing I would do is immediately make plans to scrap divisions and go to 3 set/5 rotating conference opponents, and see if that improves inventory enough to open up the contract.
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