ACC Draws Line Against SEC and Big Ten Push for Conference-Specific Rules

CHARLOTTE — Cream cheese. Some cannot live without it on their bagels, others cannot go near it.

In the past, it was so significant that it even resulted in an NCAA infraction if you had too much of it.

The rules governing college athletics have come a long way since schools got in trouble over the amount of schmear a player received. Such outdated thinking is part of the reason why those rules have not only been stricken from the books, but consigned to the dustbin of history as the perfect example of taking things a bit too far when policing the sport.

Though nobody wants to go back to that era, rulemaking has been a topic which has resurfaced prominently this year. At Big Ten spring meetings, there were extensive discussions among a number of athletic directors and coaches about options surrounding potential rules that would apply just to conference members. The SEC shouted, much more loudly, about doing the same. The latter may even be in more advanced discussions based on comments from powerful figures like Georgia president Jere Morehead.

At ACC media days this week, commissioner Jim Phillips appeared to firmly rebuke going down the same track as his aforementioned conference peers. If the league will be doing anything on its own, it seems limited to implementing a somewhat convoluted new tiebreaking procedure for its annual football championship game.

“Self-governance, to me, means no governance,” said Phillips before a standing room–only ballroom, shrugging a bit to emphasize the point Wednesday.

He’s not wrong, even if that is nominally what the Power 2 are aiming to address by creating their own league-wide rules which may be more (or less) restrictive than other conferences and even the NCAA bylaws. Central to the matter is the belief, not limited to either the SEC or Big Ten to be fair, that whatever is currently on the books is not cutting it in terms of actually being followed by schools or creating any form of a level playing field.

The College Sports Commission has drawn the ire of players and administrators for not clearing certain NIL deals while a few programs are ignoring the process completely with little to no repercussions. Numerous programs are fielding rosters with commitments to spend more than double what the revenue-sharing cap is. There are also accusations of cheating—from mundane tampering to more serious issues surrounding getting professional players back their eligibility through the courts.

“We haven’t had very much conversation about it because we don’t feel as a league that that’s the right thing, and the right path forward, for college sports. They put you in a really difficult position if each league is going to self-govern themselves,” Phillips tells Sports Illustrated. “We have talked about it [generally], but we haven’t spent an inordinate amount of time on it.”

Phillips is no stranger to having such conversations and his words carry significant weight beyond the ACC footprint given that he also chairs the NCAA Board of Governors and the Collegiate Commissioners Association, which runs things like the national letter of intent program. He’s been heavily involved in past efforts to reform the system from within over the years and unsurprisingly believes that is still the best path even as many are increasingly eyeing alternative solutions.

“I think there’s frustration, which I completely understand, but part of this is when you have several impediments right now with legal cases and people going to judges and some conversation about the clarity and some of the rules. It’s allowing people to play in the margins.

As we modernize college sports, we have to make sure that we are supporting and imploring the CSC and the NCAA enforcement group to do their job,” Phillips said. “What’s sad about what I see with some of the tampering that’s going on is there’s a failure to have restraint in college sports like I’ve never seen before.”

The NCAA has moved to address several of the issues specifically dealing with tampering in recent weeks. This included strengthening enforcement policies to put a higher burden on schools to prove their innocence in most cases. They’ve also adjusted—at the Big Ten’s urging—some of the rules tied to when a program may or may not contact players.

This is something the ACC is not immune to dealing with as the league may have been home to two of the more prominent storylines in college football this offseason had the Brendan Sorsby affair at Texas Tech not taken the lion’s share of attention the past two months. Clemson coach Dabo Swinney memorably lashed out at Ole Miss in January over rather blatant attempts to bring linebacker Luke Ferrelli to Oxford and there were plenty of hurt feelings—and a lawsuit—when Duke quarterback Darian Mensah opted to enter the transfer portal just before the window shut to wind up at conference rival Miami.

“I think that no matter what the rules have been made to be, that we’ve done a good job navigating the program into a place where we’re getting better. I’m better every single year,” says Hurricanes coach Mario Cristobal. “So on this side, you’re not going to find any complaints.”

That sentiment appears to be a limited one for the recent national runner-up however as the prospect of creating new rules—and following them—comes back into focus on the eve of the season. The Big Ten and SEC may continue to push forward with the discussion at their own set of media days across the next two weeks but, as was made pretty clear on Wednesday, the ACC has no qualms articulating that it won’t be joining such a bandwagon.

The good news for all involved, at least, is that the prospect of relitigating the amount of cream cheese on a bagel is something nowhere near the agenda when creating rules those in the sport actually want to adhere to.

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