Jim Phillips On The NCAA: Change Is Coming

New ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips has had a busy first few weeks on the job. NIL has changed everything and the NCAA has essentially thrown its hands up and said everyone is on their own.

Not surprisingly, Phillips is calling for an overhaul of the NCAA. At ACC Kickoff, Phillips said this: “This is the right time to have a complete holistic review of NCAA, leadership, structure, what we want to do moving forward” and that it should be done with “no predetermined outcomes.”

You can reasonably expect that to be the attitude for the other Power Five Commissioners and you can also reasonably expect them to be talking to each other a lot because the interests of those conferences and the rest of the NCAA are going to diverge. Everyone seems to accept NIL reality but the big conferences are going to be in a different orbit and may not like being restrained by the carcass of the old NCAA.

That’s mostly football talking of course. There may have to be separate accommodations for basketball because part of the charm of the tournament is that you can see a team from a smaller conference knock off a #1 seed, as we saw with Virginia a few years ago.

The reality is that change may just be beginning and it may be dizzying for a while.