CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The ACC will follow other college sports conferences and require availability reports for football, men’s and women’s basketball and baseball conference games in 2025, commissioner Jim Phillips announced on Tuesday.
The availability (injury) reports were required by the Big Ten in 2023 and SEC in 2024. Now, ACC schools will submit reports two days before each league game and will be posted on theACC.com.
“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 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.”
The decision comes over a month before the start of the 2025 season, and for Florida State won’t really apply until its fourth game and the league opener at Virginia on Sept. 26.
FSU coach Mike Norvell has often been candid when a player is out for an extended period of time or will miss the season. But when a player’s availability for a specific game has been in question, he has often been more guarded or said he will be a game-time decision. Norvell will likely address the added availability reports, among other topics, when he meets with the media on Wednesday.
Stanford coach Frank Reich is familiar with the need to submit injury reports from his time in the NFL, including time as a head coach of the Indianapolis Colts and Carolina Panthers. Reich admitted he’s not wild about it but sees the availability reports as a necessity.
“It’s just inevitable with the way things are,” Reich said. “As coaches we’d rather not deal with it but that’s what all of the attention the game gets and all the stuff that comes along with it.
“As coaches, we gave our opinion. We’d rather not do it. But that gets outvoted. So you just comply with it and move on.”
The ACC stopped requiring injury reports after the 2017 season.
FSU, Clemson settlements and ACC revenue
Phillips brought up the league’s revenue distribution as well as the settlement with FSU and Clemson on Tuesday in his state of the league address.
"The settlement provides long-term stability for the league with the potential for all members to benefit from additional revenue opportunities," Phillips said.
How to define long-term stability in a rapidly changing college athletics landscape is a tough one, but it’s plausible the ACC will keep its 17 teams intact at least until the major TV deals with the SEC and Big Ten expire around 2030. Conferences could then expand easier, and the ACC’s exit fee drops to $75 million in the 2030-31 athletics season.
Phillips discussed the ACC’s revenue distribution to schools with a not-so-precise comment: "Once again, we are in the top three in both overall revenues generated and per school distribution." The ACC’s “overall revenue is up 56 percent and has more than tripled in the last 13” Phillips said.
The ACC indeed is in the top three — but is clearly third. And the gap between the SEC and Big Ten distributions to those from the ACC and Big 12 will only get wider and wider. That’s especially the case as the ACC’s long-term deal features step-annual increases but runs through 2036, while the SEC and Big Ten have had chances to renegotiate their deals.
Should athletes become employees?
Years ago, Phillips said the ACC’s presidents and chancellors had little interest in seeing athletes become employees. And you’d think with recent legal battles, including the House vs. NCAA settlement, that the tone could change on employee status.
What do athletes think? Phillips met with student athlete advisory council members from all of the league’s schools on Monday.
“I haven't had one student-athlete come up to me to say that they want to be an employee,” Phillips said. “I think they appreciate being in college, going to school, working critically hard to earn a valuable degree and playing a sport at the highest level.”
Eight or nine conference games?
Phillips has mentioned in recent years that the ACC schedules well and in 2025 faces more non-conference games against Power 4 opponents than any other league. He stated ACC schools will play 26 games against teams from the other three power conferences, including Notre Dame. In FSU’s case, this includes bookend SEC matchups with Alabama in August and Florida in November.
The SEC and Big Ten have discussed going to nine league games but are not in agreement at the conference level and are uncertain how it would be weighed moving forward by the College Football Playoff selection committee. In the ACC, the topic of moving from eight league games to nine has been discussed.
“We discussed nine several times in my five years as commissioner,” Phillips said. “The group has always felt that, at the end of the day, those nonconference games have really been good for the league and we have really scheduled well.
“If the SEC ends up going to nine and maybe we end up going to nine, I think there's a few challenges. Those rivalry games that we really enjoy, I think that the fans really enjoy, I think some of those go away.”
Moving to nine league games would be viewed as a detrimental move by some ACC schools. FSU faces Florida annually, as does Georgia-Georgia Tech, Clemson-South Carolina and Kentucky-Louisville. And in the end FSU administrators in athletics and Seminole Boosters would no doubt prefer the rivalry game every other year to help strengthen a season-ticket package, in FSU’s case during even-numbered years when hosting Florida.
Fines for field, court storming
The ACC will implement fines for schools whose fans storm the football field or basketball court moving forward. Phillips said the fine structure begins at $50,000 and elevates to $100,000 and $200,000 for subsequent instances. Money from the fines will go to the ACC’s Postgraduate Scholarship fund.
‘ACC Huddle’ pregame show will spotlight top weekly game
The ACC Huddle pregame show on the ACC Network will now feature Jimbo Fisher, an announcement that came on Tuesday morning. Phillips said the show will now travel to the ACC’s marquee game weekly regardless of which network is broadcasting the game. In week 1, the ACC Huddle will be at LSU-Clemson.
Thanks for reading the Osceola. Subscribe here
