Latest news with #JimPhillips
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Sport
- Yahoo
ACC commissioner Jim Phillips named chair of NCAA Board of Governors
ACC commissioner Jim Phillips has been named chair of the NCAA Board of Governors, the NCAA announced Thursday. He will replace president Linda Livingstone, who has held the role since 2022. Phillips will serve a two-year term as board chairman, which takes effect immediately. He joined the NCAA's Board of Governors in August 2024 as a voting member and will become the first commissioner to serve as chair. 'Serving on the NCAA Board of Governors has been an incredible honor, and it's a privilege to be selected as chair,' Phillips said in a statement. 'During this time of continuous change, I look forward to the ongoing collaboration with my colleagues to elevate the student-athlete experience and further tackle the opportunities and challenges within higher education. I'm also incredibly appreciative of Linda Livingstone, as her steady leadership over the past three years was remarkable.' Phillips has served as ACC commissioner since 2021 after previously serving as the athletics director at . During his time with the university, he became the first AD to serve on the Board of Governors during his first term from 2015-17. Additionally, Phillips serves as the president of the Collegiate Commissioners Association – a role he took on last month. He has also served on the NCAA Division I men's and women's basketball selection committees and the Big Ten TV/media committee during his administrative career. 'My sincere thanks to Linda for her leadership and service as chair of the board. I'm also grateful to Jim for taking on this role and his continued dedication to the Association,' NCAA president Charlie Baker said in a statement. 'His deep experience and strategic mindset will help us build on the momentum and progress already underway.' Phillips was one of a handful of appointments to the NCAA's Board of Governors this week. president Ted Carter and president Doug Girod both joined as D-I representatives, while former Concordia-St. Paul athlete Davaris Cheeks is a Division II graduate student-athlete representative. Former athlete Allison Feaster, who also serves as the vice president of the Boston Celtics, was reappointed as an independent representative. Jim Phillips' appointment came as the NCAA Board of Governors approved two major initiatives. One would enhance the Division I basketball performance fund by adding additional units in the men's and women's tournament. Previously, the unit system stopped after the Sweet Sixteen. Additionally, the board established women's championships in stunt, as well as acrobatics and tumbling.
USA Today
04-08-2025
- Sport
- USA Today
Duke's Manny Diaz addresses new ACC availability reports in 2025
College football is moving toward a model of increased transparency when it comes to injuries. After the SEC instituted weekly availability reports last season during conference play, several other leagues have followed suit this offseason. Among them is the ACC, and commissioner Jim Phillips announced that the conference will begin publishing availability reports in football, basketball and baseball during the upcoming athletics season. As the Duke Blue Devils begin fall camp, coach Manny Diaz said that he's fairly ambivalent about the prospect of sharing availability reports. He pointed out that the league did something similar previously, as it mandated private injury sharing between teams during his stint as the head coach at Miami, though the practice has since been discontinued. 'When I was at Miami, we had it and then it went away,' Diaz said on Monday, per On3. 'You know, I don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about that. We'll do what they tell us to do.' The reports will mark a departure from Duke's previous injury policy under Diaz, however. In 2024, Diaz opted to avoid going into much detail about injuries beyond those that were season-ending. Now, the Blue Devils will be required to submit availability reports two days before games with those reports being updated in the days that follow as leagues around the country look to, among other things, curb the influence of sports betting within facilities. Follow us @DukeWire on X and like our page on Facebook to follow ongoing coverage of Duke news, notes, and opinions.
Yahoo
04-08-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Duke's Manny Diaz indifferent on new ACC availability reports
The ACC had a version of injury reporting when Manny Diaz was Miami's coach. Now that the league has mandated public availability reports every week, Diaz is indifferent to doing them at . 'When I was at Miami, we had it and then it went away,' Diaz said on Monday. 'You know, I don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about that. We'll do what they tell us to do.' ACC commissioner Jim Phillips announced last month that injury reports will come to the league for football, men's and women's basketball and baseball. Before every ACC football game, teams will submit an availability report two days before the game. It will be updated the next day and on the day of the game. 'This decision is directly connected to our ongoing commitment to best protect our student-athletes and our multi-faceted approach to addressing the effects of sports wagering,' Phillips said in Charlotte. 'In this case, it would alleviate pressure from entities or individuals who are involved in sports wagering that attempt to obtain inside information about availability from players, coaches, and other staff.' There is uniformity in requiring these reports. In recent years, some coaches would be more open and honest than others about the status of injured players. The policy Diaz is referring to was a non-public injury report shared between ACC teams before games. That was nixed sometime around 2018 or '19. Diaz kept things fairly close to the vest last season, his first at Duke. He discussed players who suffered season-ending injuries but stopped short of delving too much into details beyond that. Designations submitted before game days will be available, probable, questionable or out. The day-of updates will be submitted two hours before each game and each player will be designated as available, game time decision, or out. In basketball and baseball, reports will be submitted the day before each ACC game and on the day of the game. All availability reports and the full conference policy will be available on the ACC's website. Failure to follow the policies will be subject to review and potential penalties.
Yahoo
24-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
NCAA basketball tournament expansion growing more unlikely this season due to 'logistics'
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Any expansion of the NCAA basketball tournaments is growing more unlikely for this upcoming season, according to executives in the sport. During a speaking engagement at the National Press Club on Thursday, NCAA president Charlie Baker confirmed comments earlier this week from ACC commissioner Jim Phillips that any expansion of the men's and women's tournaments would be 'tough' to do for 2025-26. 'I think that's a reasonable statement,' Baker said. He pointed to the "logistics" involved with any expansion. The NCAA basketball selection committees — responsible for making any expansion decision — met earlier this month where committee members learned that expansion, if approved, would most likely start in 2026-27, multiple sources with knowledge of the meeting told Yahoo Sports. The comments from Baker and Phillips further advance that notion. However, during an hour-long address to the National Press Club, Baker continued to speak in favor of expanding the tournament to 72 or 76 teams to grant access to more worthy participants, such as those left on the bubble. 'There are every year some really good teams that don't get to the tournament for a bunch of reasons,' Baker told the crowd. 'One of the reasons is we have 32 automatic qualifiers (for conference champions). I love that and think it's great and never want that to change, but that means there's only 36 slots left for everybody else. 'I don't buy the idea that some of the teams that currently get left out aren't good. I think they are. And I think that sucks,' he continued. For more than a year now, college administrators have been seriously exploring adding four or eight teams to the 68-team field, a move that likely requires the addition of another 'First Four' site. Baker pushed back against suggestions that additional revenue from TV partners is behind the NCAA and conferences' desire to expand. It is not a 'big moneymaker,' he said, and the association would only want to cover the costs of expansion with any additional revenue. The NCAA has been in negotiations with the networks, Warner Bros. Discovery and CBS, for months now. Last month, Baker told Yahoo Sports that the organization has held 'good conversations' with those partners and that any decisions for 2025-26 would need to be made by 'the middle of August.' 'The big challenge is the logistical one,' Baker said Thursday from D.C. 'The tournament has to start after conference championships are over and the selection (show) happens like two hours after the last championship ends. And (the tournament) has to finish by the Tuesday before the Masters. There's not a lot of room there.' That hasn't slowed his support for expansion. In fact, Baker mentioned recent bubble teams left out of the field like St. John's and Indiana State. 'They should have been in,' he said. Expansion is 'a way to preserve the AQs and real Cinderellas, but it's also to make sure some of the 65 best teams in the country who get left out because of the 32 AQs find their way in,' he said. Baker addressed another looming issue: athlete eligibility standards. On Thursday, as he spoke to the press club, the NCAA announced a proposed legislation change to Division II eligibility rules. The proposal would grant athletes five years to play five seasons (five-in-five) instead of the current four seasons-over-five years standard. Such a change in Division I is on the 'backburner' while the NCAA adopts a new governance model, something expected next month from the NCAA DI Board of Directors. 'I would assume at some point (five-in-five) will come up again. I don't know if we'll land there or not,' Baker said of the five-in-five eligibility proposal for Division I.
Associated Press
22-07-2025
- Business
- Associated Press
The ACC has moved past lawsuits and uncertainty. Commissioner Jim Phillips sees stable years ahead
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — Jim Phillips stood in the same spot Tuesday morning that he did exactly one year earlier as he officially opened the Atlantic Coast Conference's preseason football media days. Only now, the message and tone is far different. The league has successfully quelled a rebellion in the form of the lawsuits by member schools Clemson and Florida State, which represented a threat fueling doomsayers' chatter about the league's long-term stability. Instead, the settlement that ended the legal fight spawned a new revenue-distribution model set to benefit the league's biggest brands. There was also ESPN's extension on its long-running partnership with the league. And that sends the ACC into the 2025-26 sports season with the closest thing to peace as a college landscape churning with constant change can muster. In an interview with The Associated Press, Phillips described recent months as 'the restabilization of a great league that went through a very bumpy period.' He also talked about working to 'make this a league that teams want to be in, not have to be in' at the start of the revenue-sharing era. 'We're as healthy of a league as we've ever been based on having to go through some really tough moments,' Phillips told the AP. 'I give our presidents/board credit for it, and I give our ADs a ton of credit for it as well. ... So we've moved away from some of the legal issues that we've had and now we've been able to work on things that I think have been put on the backburner.' A summer earlier, FSU, Clemson and the league were entangled in a crossfire of lawsuits over the ACC's ability to charge hundreds of millions of dollars in exit fees for schools that leave for another league. That came amid the backdrop of the ACC's financial conundrum. The league annually posts record revenue hauls ($711.4 million for 2023-24, with football-playing members receiving nearly $45 million). It also keeps lagging behind the Big Ten ($928.1 million revenue, $63.1 million payout) and Southeastern Conference ($839 million, $52.6 million), though it ranks firmly third among the Power Four leagues ahead of the Big 12 ($493.8 million, $39.5 million). Had the Clemson or FSU lawsuits proceeded, there was potential a ruling might defang the league's exit fees. Or its grant-of-rights deal, signed by all ACC schools to give the conference control of their media rights — and the TV money that comes with them — as a deterrent to moving elsewhere. Either could have triggered more teams to exit and chase revenue elsewhere, with the 2024 disintegration of the Pac-12 offering a worst-case harbinger. The stakes were clear last summer when Phillips took an assertive stance that was downright pugilistic by his own measured-tone standards in promising the league would fight 'as long as it takes.' He now touts a successful 'reconciliation' and what he calls 'a really good story about the ACC.' 'People had various opinions about how unstable it was — I never felt ever that it was going to lose its way or anything like that,' Phillips said. 'It was never going to have the demise that I had heard that may happen. I never believed that for a second. 'But you have a staff that you're dealing with. You have other schools that you're dealing with. So to me, part of my responsibility was to be incredibly level and strong and unwavering about (how) we would get to the place that we're experiencing now, where we have stability.' ESPN's decision in January to pick up its base-rights option through 2035-36 provided a key perception boost, aligning that deal's timeline with a second covering the partnership for the ACC Network. The legal settlement followed in March, featuring a revised revenue-distribution model incorporating TV viewership as a way for top programs to make more money. Throw in the last season's implementation of a 'success initiative' allowing teams to keep money generated by their own postseason success, and big-brand names like Clemson and FSU in football, or Duke, North Carolina and Louisville in basketball, have avenues to offset the gap with Big Ten or SEC peers. That said, it didn't sound like the legal fight produced constant stress at the team level. Miami coach Mario Cristobal said he never focused on uncertainty surrounding the conference's future, while linebacker Wesley Bissainthe and offensive lineman Francis Mauigoa said they essentially knew nothing about the lawsuits. 'I live in a cave,' Mauigoa said with a grin. Still, reaching resolution was a welcome sign all the same. 'For me,' Virginia coach Tony Elliott said, 'really to see the commissioner stand up there and have confidence and say the things he's said just gives me confidence.' Longer-term questions await, though. The settlement included a rollback of the ACC's grant-of-rights provision that ensured schools would bring no TV value to a new league. It also created a schedule of declining exit fees from its current nine-figure status to $75 million for the 2030-31 season, then leveling off there through the duration of the ESPN deals. That 2031 date would largely align with expiration of media deals for the Big Ten (2029-30 season) and the Big 12 (2030-31), while the SEC's deal runs through 2033-34. That confluence could set up a potential countdown for massive realignment impacting all Power Four leagues, maybe even through the formation of super league. Asked about that looming potential, Phillips could only chuckle. 'We're trying to get through this next year,' he said, 'and all the rest of it.' ___ AP college football: and
