It’s February 2025, and the biggest issue the Atlantic Coast Conference has to worry about is a struggling men’s basketball product. While that’s not a small thing—especially for the most tradition-steeped hoops league in the land—it sure beats what the ACC has had to navigate the previous 18 months.

It wasn’t dead, but was declared to be dying on more than one occasion. It was at war with itself, with two petulant (but important) members assailing league credibility and stability from within. It was accused of being reactive instead of proactive; of being a realignment loser; of being left behind in the football power struggle.

It was all wrong. The ACC is alive and relatively well. In the eat-or-be-eaten world of college athletics, it is off the endangered species list.

It’s less of a comeback story than a survivor’s tale. Dating back to early August 2023, when the Pac-12 finally collapsed, ACC commissioner Jim Phillips and the league were under siege. Now they’ve come out on the other side.

Stability was locked in last week when ESPN officially picked up a nine-year option on its media-rights agreement with the ACC, running through the 2035–36 season. That’s a long time to guarantee anything in this industry, and in truth all bets are off when we hit the ’30s and other conference media-rights deals approach expiration. But for the next five years at least, the ACC should remain a major player with a stable membership.

The SEC and Big Ten will continue to hog much of the available revenue, which is simply the law of the jungle at this point. But the ACC and Big 12 are viable power conferences that should remain competitive across the board—and the ACC is the better positioned of those two.

The ACC put two teams in the expanded 12-team College Football Playoff this past season. It has put four teams in the last three men’s basketball Final Fours. It has placed eight teams in the last nine Final Fours of both the men’s and women’s tournaments. It perennially populates the upper echelon of the Learfield Directors’ Cup standings for all-sports programs.

And despite having its expansion additions of the SMU Mustangs, Stanford Cardinal and California Golden Bears widely panned at the time, it’s worked out pretty well. SMU arrived with a thunderclap, fielding a playoff football team in 2024. The Mustangs and Stanford are both in the top six in the men’s basketball standings and in contention for NCAA tournament at-large spots. All three schools have power programs in the Olympic sports, as well.

In an ideal world, those three universities would never be in the ACC. But the collapse of the Pac-12 ushered everyone into a decidedly un-ideal world, and the ACC’s move to add Stanford, Cal and SMU was the best option for all involved parties.

It prevented the travesty of the Bay Area schools being spun off into oblivion. It provided a springboard for the ambitious Mustangs and their well-heeled donors. And it led to additional league revenue, which is what the divisive shouting was all about in the first place.

“Unless something drastic changes on the revenue side at the ACC, it’s not a matter of if we leave, in my opinion,” declared Florida State Seminoles trustee Drew Weatherford, a former football player at the school, said on Aug. 2, 2023. “It’s a matter of how and when we leave.”

That bluster was followed by an undefeated football season for the Seminoles that still ended in a CFP snub. Shortly thereafter, on Dec. 22, 2023—Merry Christmas!—FSU sued the ACC, citing the playoff rejection as a manifestation of the league’s shortcomings. Florida State declared the league wasn’t equipped to keep its most accomplished members competitive, and sought to reduce exit penalties tied to the ACC’s grant of broadcast rights.

FSU, of course, signed the grant of rights agreement. Citing that contract, the ACC said hell no the Noles can’t go—not without paying full freight, which could be more than a half-billion dollars.

Three months later, Florida State’s silent partner in league sabotage, the Clemson Tigers, emerged from the shadows and filed their own lawsuit against the ACC. The only two schools that have won football national titles as ACC members were now openly at war with the conference.

Agitating for a cheaper way out of the league created the impression that Florida State and Clemson had somewhere better to go. That never materialized, despite their fans—especially Florida State’s—insisting the school had a secret handshake deal with either the Big Ten or the SEC. 

The SEC would only have happened over the collective dead bodies of the Florida Gators and South Carolina Gamecocks and against the wishes of commissioner Greg Sankey—prohibitive roadblocks. The Big Ten would be taking on the bloat of 20 members while trying to crack open its massive media-rights deals in search of even more cash—also not happening.

Meanwhile, karma being what it is, Florida State football utterly collapsed. The Noles lost their 2023 season bowl game 63–3 to the Georgia Bulldogs, then put a 2–10 disaster on the field in ’24. After declaring itself too good for the league, Florida State finished 17th in the 17-team ACC.

With ESPN not interested in cashing out of its advantageous deal with the ACC and the Noles and Tigers lacking other options, suing the conference came to seem like an unwise expenditure of time and money. But that doesn’t mean FSU and Clemson got nothing for their efforts. 

A “success initiative” that tilts revenue to schools that perform well in the CFP and NCAA tournament is in place. More money is being allotted to the brands that draw eyeballs on TV. And the latest tweak is the ACC’s move to pair two of its top three football brands—FSU, Clemson and the Miami Hurricanes—against the Notre Dame Fighting Irish every season.

(That’s really the only development that benefits the fans—more quality football matchups. Florida State fans rallying around the cause of higher revenue will never not be weird.)

So there is peace in our time in the ACC. Now it has to fix basketball.

The league has undergone an incredible coaching brain drain over the last three years, losing institutions all over the place. The retirement list is long: Mike Krzyzewski of the Duke Blue Devils; Roy Williams of the North Carolina Tar Heels; Mike Brey of Notre Dame; Jim Boeheim of the Syracuse Orange; Tony Bennett of the Virginia Cavaliers; Jim Larrañaga of Miami; and Leonard Hamilton of Florida State.

Replacements have been a mixed bag at best, with some still to come (Miami, Florida State). The presumption is that Jon Scheyer can make Final Fours and win national titles at Duke, perhaps as soon as this season, but he has to actually do it. Hubert Davis made a Final Four at North Carolina, but he’s also in danger of missing the NCAA tournament for the second time in three seasons. The product has cratered at Syracuse and Virginia. The staying power post-legend remains to be seen at both FSU and Miami, which are experiencing downturns this year.

An 18-team league with heavy basketball tradition might get only three or four teams in the field of 68 this season. Duke is the only ACC team assured of a high seed, with Clemson, Louisville and Pittsburgh all hurting their résumés with upset losses within the last week. There is little distinction between second place and 15th at the moment.

But this figures to be a temporary problem in a league where basketball is too big to chronically fail. If football continues to upgrade itself—hello, Bill Belichick—the ACC is in solid position for the rest of the 2020s. Given the assaults upon its credibility over the previous 18 months—from the outside and within—that’s a successful survivor’s tale.

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