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ATLANTIC COAST CONFERENCE MEDIA DAYSJuly 21, 2014John SwoffordGREENSBORO, NORTH CAROLINA Q. I had a question about yesterday's forum. You mentioned during it that the ACC was looking into helmet cameras, and I'm sort of confused. Is that a health thing that you're looking at that for or is that a potential for a broadcast situation? What are the uses of that for the ACC? JOHN SWOFFORD: Well, I don't know that it's a health thing necessarily. There might be some implications in that regard in terms of having a camera on a player's helmet and getting a better sense of what that particular player or even the area where an official is and what's happening, what's coming at him, what that person is seeing or not seeing. But I think as much as anything, it would be an opportunity to‑‑ not necessarily during a live broadcast, although that's a possibility, too‑‑ but a teaching device with coaches in terms of what a player is seeing, whether it's‑‑ Perryman from Miami, the linebacker, wore one during Miami's spring game, for instance. And I talked with him the night before last a little bit about it, and just to see if it bothered him or if he even knew it was there, and he said he didn't, other than he saw it when he put his helmet on and that was the end of it. He didn't even know it was there. But it could potentially be beneficial from a coaching and teaching standpoint in some instances. Q. It's a cyclical thing of when teams are good, and I know when divisions are made, it's just made for that instance. But would this be an interesting year to not have divisions, where we just go 1 through 14‑‑ and I know we're not doing it and it's not on the discussion‑‑ but is that because you have to have two divisions to continue to have a championship game, or where do we stand with that? JOHN SWOFFORD: You do‑‑ under current NCAA legislation, you have to have 12 teams in one conference to have a championship game. Those 12 teams have to be divided into two divisions, and the divisional champions are the only two teams that can play in a Conference Championship game. As you probably know, we have put forward, along with the Big 12, legislation that would, in essence, take the NCAA out of that decision and leave it up to the conferences to decide whether they have a Conference Championship game, and if so, how they determine the two teams that play in it. A lot of people have interpreted that, I think, to mean that we would want to change what we're doing if that were to pass. That's not necessarily true. We simply feel that philosophically that that should be in the hands of the conferences, not the NCAA. If you didn't have that rule, you could take us‑‑ for example, you could be a 14‑team league without divisions, as we are in basketball, for instance, and you could decide how the two teams that were going to play in the Conference Championship game could be determined. It might be the two teams with the best conference record percentage‑wise, and you'd have to have a few tiebreakers involved with that. It could be the top two teams as rated by the College Football Playoff Selection Committee at the end of the year. The one thing that would‑‑ and I think a lot of people don't think about this particularly‑‑ but if you went to, in our case, a 14‑team football league and no divisions, how you schedule could change dramatically in the sense that you could rotate who you're playing year in and year out and you would see each other much more often than you do with divisions. Because with divisions you have to play, under the current legislation, everybody in your division every year, so that limits the teams in the other division and how often you can see them. If you ever did that, and again, I'm probably talking about it too much because that probably‑‑ Q. There are a lot of ifs in there. JOHN SWOFFORD: There are a lot of ifs. If you did that, your regular season scheduling would be impacted just as dramatically as how you determined the two teams that play in the Conference Championship game. Q. If autonomy‑‑ if August 7th is passed and autonomy is granted, would that be a subject you would talk about as a conference? JOHN SWOFFORD: Well, it doesn't necessarily relate directly to autonomy. That's a piece of legislation that the board will consider doing away with regardless of what happens on August 7th. It's separate from that. So if and when the board does away with it, I'm sure we'll discuss it just like other conferences will discuss it. But I would emphasize, again, we're not putting it forward knowing that we would change anything if it were to pass. Q. The league has never had a problem moving players into the NFL Draft. The first round of the NFL Draft has really hung its hat on that. How critical was it to boast a national champion and get the second BCS win from a respect standpoint for your brand of football? JOHN SWOFFORD: I think it's something we really needed as a conference. You know, for the last number of years, I've said every year, I think, that perceptually a National Championship changes things dramatically, and that we needed as a conference to win at least our share if not more than our share of those key games, particularly key non‑conference games that are out there each year. Last year started very early with Clemson beating Georgia, Miami beating Florida, and it culminated with the National Championship in Florida State and an Orange Bowl win with Clemson over Ohio State and 11 bowl teams and 11 teams with winning records, something no conference had done since 1932, and individual players winning just about every single really meaningful and prestigious individual award in college football. So it ended up being a terrific year football‑wise. That changes perceptions. Those are the things you have to do to change perception, and hopefully we can build on that. Every year is not going to be that magical, so to speak, and sometimes you don't realize how good the year is until it's over with. Because I think we felt like we were having a good year, but then when you cap it off with all those awards individually and Florida State and their dramatic win in the National Championship game on top of Clemson's win over Ohio State in the Orange Bowl, I mean, that's a pretty good month of January. So we would take that kind of year every year, as every conference would. Q. What has this been like the last couple years? You have Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Louisville coming in, Maryland going out. Now you can kind of sit and look at your conference as a whole. What has it been like to do that this year and say it is what it is right now? JOHN SWOFFORD: Very enjoyable. You know, it really is good to be at this point. I think if you go back a little over a year to the spring, April of 2013, when our schools decided to go ahead and sign a media grant of rights inclusive of Louisville and Notre Dame, with Louisville knowing they were coming in, I think that really settled our conference and also settled the national landscape to a significant degree, as well. To be back to a point where you feel like you've been through the expansion wars, so to speak, and landed in a really, really good place in terms of positioning this conference for the long‑term, it is really a good feeling, and it's‑‑ I don't think I'm the only commissioner or athletic director or president that would say that. I think our‑‑ I don't know if you call college athletics an industry or not‑‑ but our industry needed, needs, that kind of stability for a while. And the ACC has been a prominent player in all this. But even saying all that, I think we're all to a point where college athletics needs that kind of membership stability at the major college level, and I think we have that now. Q. You probably touched on this yesterday, but there are a couple of things in college athletics right now that could change the face of college athletics. Number one, the big five conferences wanting more autonomy with the NCAA and then you've got this O'Bannon lawsuit and some other lawsuits. What significant changes do you think are eventually going to come down from all of this and how will things change? JOHN SWOFFORD: Well, that crystal ball sometimes is a little cloudy, as you know. But you know, I don't know, I think some of the legal‑‑ some of the litigation that's going on right now, I don't think will be resolved for another three to five years possibly. There may be Congressional involvement during that period of time, so we'll just have to wait and see on some of that. I think depending on what comes down, what rulings come down, I suspect there will be a number of appeals, and some of that may end up in the Supreme Court some day. So we'll have to see how that evolves, and you've got the National Labor Relations Board and their decisions forthcoming on some things. But along with that, and these are things that are more controllable for those of us in college athletics, you've got the NCAA changes that I think will happen on August the 7th, and I think the five conferences certainly will have much more autonomy than we now have. Along with that autonomy goes a certain level of responsibility to take that autonomy and do good things with it, so to speak, in terms of some of the changes that we feel like need to be made such as adjusting the scholarship in an upward way to full cost of attendance, four‑year scholarships. I think we need to take a look at our rules and regulations as they relate to the elite athletes in our programs. Sometimes we forget that's a fairly small percentage of our student athletes and our programs, but obviously a very visible part of our programs. And are we, by the very nature of our own rules and regulations, prohibiting them from finding out the kind of information they need to find out to make good decisions in terms of whether they stay another year in our programs or whether they go on to the NBA or the NFL? Our regulations may be part of the problem there. We might should be more liberal with some of that so that these young guys can have more freedom within the rules and not be pushed to a back alley to getting information and being involved with people they shouldn't be involved with. Personally, I think we need to look at that, and I think autonomy will help us do that. I like the fact that we've got athletic directors that are going to be much more involved than they've been over the last decade or so in terms of the NCAA, again, assuming that this new structure passes on August the 7th. I think it's a really good thing that if that passes, student athletes will be around the legislative table and having a vote on particular pieces of legislation that would go forward. So we've got some really significant potential changes on the table that I think will happen. Conceptually, I think the five conferences are very much on the same page. I think we all know that when you get beyond concepts and into the particulars, the devil is in the details, so to think that all 65 schools in the five conferences think alike about how you should define full cost of attendance is probably naïve. But I think we are on the same page in terms of concept, which means I do think we'll be able to find something that can garner enough votes to pass some of these pieces of legislation that really do need to pass to bring about appropriate change. You go back to the Northwestern situation and the NLRB events of that, and a number of the issues that have been brought up related to that have been being talked about for a couple of years now within the NCAA structure and particularly by those of us in the five conferences. But we haven't been able to make the changes we feel like need to be made. Autonomy will give us the opportunity to do that, if that indeed happens. In sequence, then, I don't know where that leaves you necessarily with unionization and some of the litigation that's out there, so it may be taken care of internally with changes that, as I said, we can kind of control within intercollegiate athletics if we have the right processes to do so. Q. (No microphone.). JOHN SWOFFORD: I don't see pay for play. I may be wrong. I've been wrong plenty of times before, but I do not see that, no. I don't think that's what the majority of Americans want to see in college athletics. I don't even think the majority of college athletes believe that's the right route to go. I think we have to be careful as we address all of these things that we don't‑‑ college athletics is not just football and basketball. That garners the most attention obviously, and those are terrific sports, beautiful sports, that we all enjoy it tremendously, but it does go beyond that. And we're still only talking about 2, 3 percent of our athletes that are elite athletes that are going to go on to make a living playing professionally. And even those that do, you look at the average career in the NFL or the NBA or Major League Baseball, and on average that's a pretty short career. There's a lot of life after that which gets us back to the whole point of education. I think we have something really special in this country that is unique to the United States, and that's a really high level of athletics played as a part of higher education. I've been in this my entire career, and there's always been a certain stress between academics and athletics. But it's worth that stress, and I think it's an important part of our culture, and when it's done well and done right, it's a gorgeous thing, and when it's done poorly, it's an ugly thing. And we need to do it and do it the right way because I think it's meaningful and the collegiate model is worth retaining. Q. As you know, revenue from the playoff system is going to go up dramatically over the BCS. If I understood Michael Kelly's numbers correctly, the power conferences get $75 million, which would be $15 million for the ACC. How much do you see each school getting above what they used to get with the BCS, and could that revenue help move each school closer to your dream of more fully funding scholarships? JOHN SWOFFORD: Well, I think the revenue will be important in the whole scholarship issue and the full cost of attendance. Our bowl revenue, basically, will, on average‑‑ from the average to the BCS to the average of the College Football Playoff, the postseason numbers are pretty close to tripling, so it's significant. I would also add one other thing. A lot of people think because of the things Bob just brought up that major college athletic programs are all awash, all of a sudden, in money, and they're not, because of all the other sports that they're sponsoring and the student athletes that are being aided and given an opportunity to compete and get an education. So it's not like the NFL or the NBA where you look at this as one team and one sport. That's just not the reality of intercollegiate athletics. But it helps a lot. It helps a lot. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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