Pitt Leaving Its Mark on ACC's Spring Meetings
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PITTSBURGH -- College sports, particularly football is at a major inflection point, and, at the ACC's Spring Meetings in Amelia Island, Florida, coaches and athletic directors discussed the future and their conference's place in it. The Pitt Panthers were at the center of the controversy that kicked off a panic about the state of college football, and they are taking an active role in making sure that they aren't burned again.
Perhaps the most pressing issue on the table -- NIL and the transfer portal -- is a national one, and thus something that the ACC has little power to act on alone. After reports surfaced that Pitt wide receiver Jordan Addison was being tempted to enter the transfer portal with promises of multi-million dollar NIL deals, coaches and players from around the conference came out to detail their own experiences with tampering.
Before meetings began, Zay Flowers, another star wideout for Boston College, said that he was offered six-figure NIL deals to enter the portal and join a new team. Then Louisville head coach Scott Satterfield said he knew of several players on his team that had been tampered with. He specifically referenced Tyler Harrell, a former Cardinal receiver that has since joined Alabama. On Monday, Florida State head coach Mike Norvell became the latest to offer that some of his players had been tampered with.
Multiple coaches and athletic directors, even if they didn't detail their own struggles with illicit recruiting, acknowledged that the general sentiment among coaches is confusion and concern.
"Out coaches ... just want to know what the rules are," Clemson athletic director Graham Neff said.
Pitt head coach Pat Narduzzi will soon be in a prime position to help influence the ACC's official position and informal attitudes on on the transfer portal and NIL. At the end of this year, he will take over as chair of the ACC Coaches Committee for Wake Forest's Dave Clawson, who currently holds the position.
Virginia head coach Tony Elliot said that Monday's deliberations centered more on the transfer portal than NIL, and that on Tuesday they will discuss ditching the ACC's current two-division championship model, which limits cross-division matchups and makes some pairings like Clemson-Pitt rare.
“I’ve been in the league for three years and we’ve talked about it every year,” NC State athletic director Boo Corrigan said.
There are a couple of proposals floating around Amelia Island right now, according to ESPN's Pete Thamel, but they follow a similar pattern. They involve placing each team into pods of two or three that will play each other every year, leaving the remainder of a team's eight conference opponents to be determined on a rotating basis.
The group of assembled coaches and athletic directors continued to consider and discuss moving ACC headquarters out of its traditional home in Greensboro, North Carolina.
David Tell of the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported on Tuesday that Pitt chancellor Patrick Gallagher, who is stepping down from his position in 2023, was one of the school officials that toured potential relocation cities Orlando, Florida and Charlotte, North Carolina.
While it will have little if any, relation to what happens on the field or court, David Hale of ESPN, said on Monday that moving league headquarters would signal a symbolic, but still tangible transition from the tenure of former commissioner John Swofford to that of current commissioner Jim Phillips.
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