Some highlights:
-But as the business of college football has gotten bigger, the rewards of success richer, and the battles for conference supremacy more intense, the ACC's role as college football's most colorful band of swashbuckling misfits isn't so fun for the coaches whose careers hang in the balance and the programs desperate to keep pace in a rapidly evolving landscape in which the ACC often feels woefully behind.
"The ACC is becoming a laughingstock," one former ACC coach said. "It's not a cool place to be."
Duke's presence in Charlotte on Saturday 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 ACC has two problems," one former ACC coach said. "The real ones and 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.
"You may feel that way, and sometimes I may feel that way," Phillips said about being treated as a lesser league, "but ... one of the things we have to do is we've got to perform better. We have to do our part."
"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."
Many of the coaches and ADs who spoke with ESPN praised Phillips' efforts to modernize the conference but said the culture that led the ACC to fall behind in the past remains embedded into the league's DNA for too many schools. For all of Phillips' efforts to push the ACC toward a more aggressive plan of action, he works for university presidents, who've too often been out of step with the modern college football landscape, according to nearly everyone who spoke with ESPN.
The league's cultural identity as a basketball conference was a common complaint among coaches and ADs who spoke with ESPN, and an engrained philosophy of doing more with less convinced even bigger schools that investment wasn't necessary. After all, if Frank Beamer, Bobby Bowden and a host of Miami coaches had won big without throwing millions of dollars at players and building massive football operations buildings, why couldn't the new cast of coaches?
The national perspective often suggests it's the result of a down league, because the ACC's signature brands haven't met expectations.
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.
"All colleges suffer from inertia," the coach said, "but Saban came in and wrecked things."
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.
The ACC is just recently coming to the same conclusion.
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this is just part of the article. It's well written and goes into further detail, with examples. It talks about fan engagement and participation in actually GOING to games; the role of basketball in the state of football, etc.
