Daryl Gross’ phone buzzed at the 2011 U.S. Open in Queens, New York. It was an Atlantic Coast Conference official, whom Gross declined to name, saying that Syracuse, then a member of the Big East, essentially could join the ACC within two years.

Ecstatic, Gross, then Syracuse’s director of athletics, immediately called Chancellor Nancy Cantor to set up a meeting. Within two weeks, in a conference room at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, California, the pair pitched the move to Syracuse University’s Board of Trustees. On that early September day, they presented a PowerPoint detailing their interest to move from the Big East to the ACC, a decision in need of only the board’s approval. The big pitch: increased exposure and revenue streams.

That came swiftly. On Sept. 18, 2011, the ACC announced Syracuse, plus Pittsburgh, would join the league. Once a cornerstone of the Big East, Syracuse rapidly negotiated an early departure and paid $7.5 million in exit fees. On July 1, 2013, Syracuse officially joined the ACC. The conference’s financial promise was clear in the sights of officials at SU, the second-largest employer in Onondaga County, behind only the State University of New York Upstate Medical University.

“The Big East had some major challenges,” Gross said last month. “And you snooze, you lose. We needed to move.”

Six years and one month after it announced the switch to the ACC, Syracuse has benefited from increased exposure, like most recently when the football team upset defending national champion Clemson on ESPN. This translates to conference payout revenue and benefits from the 2019 launch of the ACC Network, which will presumably garner even more conference media revenue.

ACC schools collected $20.2 million payout increases in 2015, about 3.6 times Big East schools, according to estimates by the NCAA, Forbes and John Vrooman, a Vanderbilt University sports economist.

Nearly four and a half years into the new conference, the switch has proved to strengthen SU athletic department finances by more than $75 million and draw more, and better, athletes to help vault the school into a national power across a variety of sports.

“The move to the ACC was needed,” said Marc Ganis, president of the Chicago-based sports business advisory firm Sportscorp Ltd. “It was inevitable. The ACC was the best fit for Syracuse.”

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The move, like others around the country, came about because of the money that comes from television football games. When switching conferences, administrators issue statements discussing academics, geography and peer institutions, but financial stability pilots such decisions.

The ACC in 2014-15 racked up $212 million in television deals revenue, Vrooman estimated, more than 10 times what the Big East took in over the same period. The increased visibility of appearing on national TV provided a boost that’s not going away. In 2012, the ACC and ESPN agreed on a multimillion-dollar rights deal that extends through the 2016-27 season.

Last summer, the ACC and ESPN agreed to a 20-year deal through 2035-36, highlighted by the creation of the ACC Network. It guarantees each of the 15 ACC schools’ media rights would remain with the ACC regardless of school affiliation, making it unlikely any of the schools will leave the conference.

“Getting guaranteed money every year from the ACC is a must,” said Robert Malekoff, a lecturer in the department of exercise and sport science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “You have to have that money because you won’t generate that money any other way.”

The downsides of Syracuse’s move are scarce, experts said. They said there are few notable growing pains, save for SU’s football and men’s basketball teams playing in a league more challenging than they did before. Syracuse football has had only one winning season in its four full seasons as an ACC member, and average attendance has slipped over the same period. In the past three years, SU men’s basketball made one NCAA Tournament Final Four and missed the postseason in the other two.

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The ACC move did come with transitional turbulence. Less than two years after joining the ACC, the NCAA slammed Syracuse with sanctions on March 6, 2015, for findings that included Syracuse breaking its own drug policy, improper academic benefits and a “lack of institutional control” over the athletic department. There also were incidents of athletes receiving impermissible benefits from assistants and tutors.

All of it created a bevy of penalties, including scholarship reductions and vacated wins, producing a public image nightmare for the university.

But overall, experts said, Syracuse’s move to the ACC was integral for the athletic department’s long-term livelihood.

“Nobody understood the financial uncertainty we were facing,” Gross said. “Pittsburgh had announced to leave, shortly after West Virginia. Some dominos started to fall.”

The difficulty of financing athletic programs is not unique to any single school. Over the past decade, only about 25 FBS schools generated more revenue than they spent, according to NCAA reports.

Malekoff groups most Division I schools three categories. The first is powerhouses such as Ohio State, Michigan and Alabama, which he said “generate incredible revenue.” The next group include schools he said roughly break even, like Syracuse, North Carolina and North Carolina State. The universities sharing in the conference payout with the ACC “is integral for their financial survival,” he said.

If Syracuse were left out of a Power 5 conference for several years, Malekoff said, “it could be in financial ruin.”

Notre Dame, an ACC school in all 23 of its sports except football, gained independence for scheduling flexibility to preserve long-time rivalries that perform well on TV. UND is also able to negotiate its own TV contract with NBC through 2025 and worth $15 million per year, according to ESPN.

Malekoff and Ganis pointed to the state of a handful of programs. They said the ACC’s conference realignment — Syracuse, Pittsburgh and Notre Dame joining in 2013 and Louisville in 2014 — left out schools such as Connecticut, which fell to what Malekoff classifies as the third tier: “on the outside looking in.”

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UConn, a longtime Syracuse basketball rival, is now in American Athletic Conference. There was an average AAC school payout of about $5.6 million in 2015, four times less than that of ACC schools.

Universities contort themselves toward the promise of big-time athletics and national exposure, Malekoff and Ganis said, but that doesn’t mean there are no losers from conference moves. Not the least of which is Rutgers, a former Syracuse Big East rival that has faced a series of headaches since moving to the Big Ten, including an investigation into the football program.

For Syracuse, the ACC seemed necessary.

“People weren’t informed with the underlying challenges of the Big East,” said Gross, adding that Syracuse could have ratified a contract with ESPN to stay in its former conference.

Gross said he thought contract negotiations between Big East schools and ESPN could keep the glue together. Then rumors of an impending Pac-12 contract circulated, Gross said, swaying some schools from staying within what would be a less profitable Big East.

For the ACC, anchoring the New York City market and gaining a stronger foothold in the Northeast was a must. It is now difficult to pick up a taxicab in New York City, drive past a billboard on a nearby interstate highway or attend a Syracuse athletic event over the past four years without a sign declaring Syracuse as “New York’s College Team.” That branding was a key to the ACC’s acceptance of Syracuse, Gross said.

As part of the ACC, Syracuse field hockey and cross country have won national titles. The men’s soccer team won the conference title in 2015 and advanced to the sport’s final four. The SU men’s and women’s basketball teams reached the Final Four in 2016.

The switch has validated most predictions, delivering Syracuse a hefty payday and big wins.

Published on October 16, 2017 at 10:16 pm

Contact Matthew: mguti100@syr.edu | @MatthewGut21