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After a long and pointless process, it was announced today that the ACC will leave Greensboro and relocate to Charlotte. They were reportedly deciding between staying in Greensboro, Orlando, and Charlotte.
The ACC was never going to stay in Greensboro. The day Jim Phillips became commissioner, he had one foot out the door of Greensboro and his sights set on Charlotte. The ACC claims this will improve the conference, and being in Charlotte will help them compete with the top conferences in college athletics.
Moving your headquarters does not add any value to a conference or solve any of its fundamental problems. The SEC, the most successful college sports conference, is based in Birmingham, Alabama. They had the opportunity to go to Atlanta a few years back and ultimately decided to stay in Birmingham. They have only gotten more powerful as a conference since then. In 2014, the PAC-12 moved its headquarters to an expensive lavish location in downtown San Francisco. Earlier this year, the PAC-12 already declined to renew its lease and will now be working from home.
This proves that having a vast headquarters will do nothing for the conference. The PAC-12 has been rapidly declining, and moving its headquarters to San Francisco did not have any positives.
This is the most mind-boggling part of all of this. For something that clearly shows it will not improve a conference's status, why waste $15 million of North Carolina taxpayers' money? If you are a North Carolina resident, you have every right to be outraged. To the average NC resident, it's going to seem as if taxpayer money is being used so ACC officials can live in Charlotte rather than Greensboro. Commissioner Jim Phillips claims "the return on investment will outweigh the $15 million". But how? Moving your headquarters has been proven never to add value to a conference, so how will there be a return on investment? It's a vague political answer that has zero substance of truth.
Greensboro offered everything the ACC asked for. Orlando and Greensboro were solely used as leverage to get a better offer from Charlotte. In this video below, Josh Graham of WSJS Sports gives me a perfect explanation of why Greensboro was never a real option.
We all know issues with the ACC's TV contract. They are stuck in a 20-year deal with ESPN where they will make less than three times what SEC and Big Ten schools are bringing in. The ACC is a prime target to get their top programs poached by the SEC and Big Ten. The ACC is in a crisis, and ensuring they can renegotiate their TV contract and keep everyone in the conference should be the top concern. Wasting time on a pointless headquarters does nothing for the future of the conference.
Lastly, it stinks that people running college sports are ruining what makes it so special just because they are getting blinded by a dollar sign when they are already making absurd amounts of money. In the long run, all this conference realignment will tarnish the product, and I believe we will see a correction, but that will not be for at least 15-20 years. At the end of the day, it's always about the money, and that's just how it is, unfortunately.
