As ACC tournament arrives in Greensboro, a moment of crossroads for conference, city
The mascots arrived right on cue, five minutes before 6 on Monday night in Greensboro. There was Otto the Orange, from Syracuse. Mr. Wuf, from N.C. State. Cimarron, the man-like horse (or horse-like man?) from Florida State. They stepped out of the minivans that transported them, straightened their costumes and large heads and walked into an event space across the street from the Greensboro Coliseum, ready to spread ACC cheer.
A party awaited — the “2023 Tournament Town Tip-Off Party,” as the event’s organizers called it. Greensboro was about to embark upon a basketball odyssey of great proportion: the ACC women’s basketball tournament began this past Wednesday. The league’s men’s tournament begins Tuesday. The city is hosting first- and second-round NCAA tournament games the week after that.
Thirty-four games in 19 days. Tournament Town. Same as it ever was, except, well — much different.
The mascots made their way toward the front, past the hobnobbing patrons, some of whom had been to dozens of ACC men’s tournaments here; past the tables stocked with barbecue and beef tips and sushi and egg rolls, and bopped about as a band called The Plaids — dressed in, yes, plaid pants — belted out smooth contemporary jams. Nancy Vaughan, the Greensboro mayor, and Jim Phillips, the ACC commissioner, welcomed the attendees, and they closed their remarks with identical and cheery renditions of “Go ACC!”
Let the basketball begin.
The vibes were festive. They were light. They were nostalgic. They were ... a bit weird?
Indeed, that too. Then again, so are the times for Greensboro and the ACC, a city and a conference locked in an awkward dance of uncertainty; a place, and a league born out of that place, attempting to navigate the turbulence that is now the norm in major college athletics. Nothing is quite like it once was in college sports. Conference membership feels tenuous, for one, everywhere outside of the Big Ten and SEC. And basketball, which gave rise to the ACC, has more and more seen its national relevance confined to one month.
For decades, the men’s ACC tournament remained a cornerstone of North Carolina culture, an event that transcended sports and one for which tickets, at least in advance, proved almost impossible to acquire. And for decades this city gave the ACC its home, in a literal sense, and became the unofficial home of its marquee event. The Greensboro Coliseum this week is hosting the tournament for the 29th time; no other venue has hosted it more than 13 times.
Here, though, is a crossroads. The ACC last September announced it would be moving its headquarters from Greensboro to Charlotte, and that move will transpire this summer. And, beyond this week, it’s unclear when the ACC tournament will be back in Greensboro, home to so many of the event’s indelible moments — from N.C. State’s overtime triumph against Maryland in 1974 to The Randolph Childress Show of 1995 to the packed houses that have welcomed the tournament back, year after year, as the ACC has become more unrecognizable relative to its roots.
The ACC’s ties to Greensboro are deep
In Greensboro, there has been a sense of quiet mourning ever since the ACC announced its decision to leave. It’s less of a tangible loss than an emotional one, a blow to civic pride, an erosion of a city’s identity; a “disappointment,” as locals kept using the word again and again to describe the conference’s move.
The ACC was born in this city in 1953, in a smoke-filled room at the old Sedgefield Inn, and its impending departure has delivered to some of the more-connected locals a feeling that resembles abandonment. Vaughan, the mayor, is the daughter of Fred Barakat, a longtime ACC assistant commissioner who became one of the behind-the-scenes faces of the league’s national rise in the 1980s and 90s. Like many civic leaders here, Vaughan fought hard for the ACC to stay.
“It’s not a goodbye,” she said during a brief interview on Monday, as the band played in the background. She attended her first ACC tournament in Greensboro in the late-1980s, back when the Greensboro Coliseum essentially hosted it every other year. This year, she pledged that the city is “going to do one of the best tournaments.”
“We get better every single year. We look forward to a long, continued relationship with the ACC. We really do the best tournaments, and I think they recognize that.”
And yet Vaughan acknowledged the obvious, too: “Of course there are mixed emotions. We hate to see the office go to Charlotte. But really, it is the tournaments that bring in the money.”
The back-to-back weeks of hosting the men’s and women’s ACC tournaments are expected to deliver to Greensboro an economic impact of approximately $21 million, according to the city’s convention and visitors bureau. The women’s tournament accounts for about $7.4 million of that estimate; the men’s tournament $13.6 million.
And, to be sure, the hotels will be crowded, the restaurants “rocking and rolling,” as Vaughan put it, throughout the first few weeks of March. And yet there are signs, too, that even in Greensboro college basketball has lost some of its shine.
Getting a ticket is easier than it once was
The most obvious harbinger of change is that the men’s ACC tournament, whose sold-out status for decades forced would-be attendees to master the dark art of ticket-scalping, is now a relatively easy ticket.
In the old days, which weren’t all that long ago, really, the easiest way to get ACC tournament tickets was to mingle about outside the arena — in Greensboro or anywhere else — in the moments after a game, waiting for the losing team’s fans to stream out. By then, too, anyone who’d done their research would know which group of fans had the most desirable seats, because each school received an allotment of tickets confined to one portion of the arena, some a lot better than others.
Interested buyers would hold up a hand, the number of fingers raised indicating the desired number of tickets: Two? Three? Four? Sure. The space outside the turnstiles, and even throughout the concourse, inside, came to resemble a stock market trading floor, ticket books trading hands with impressive speed, deals made on the fly. It was part of the tournament’s charm, especially in Greensboro, which is an easy enough drive for about half the schools in the conference.
The easiest way to procure tournament tickets now is to simply go online and buy them. There’s no shortage available — any session on any day, including the semifinals on Friday and the championship game on Saturday. Commercials for ACC tournament tickets have aired during recent broadcasts of ACC regular-season games, which is an odd sight to anyone who remembers the not-so-distant past and the reality that advance tickets were never for sale. One had to be a big-wig booster, or know someone who knew someone. Now? Just type ticketmaster.com into a browser.
This isn’t the first time tournament tickets are publicly available in Greensboro, especially, though it feels jarring that they are. This is the first time, however, that the league has opened up seating the way it will be open this week. Schools will not have designated blocks around the Greensboro Coliseum, with spectators in light blue indicating North Carolina’s section and red N.C. State’s and orange Virginia’s (because, well, let’s be honest: Miami fans have never exactly flocked to this event). Instead, fans will be dispersed around the arena, regardless of affiliation.
Maybe that helps improve the atmosphere, especially in the earlier rounds. Maybe it helps to cover up those sections that would’ve been more sparsely filled (say, Boston College or Miami). For better or worse it will be different, another indication that this event is no longer the fraternal reunion it used to be. If the old 8/9 game on Thursday night — the “Les Robinson Invitational,” it came to be known in the mid-1990s, due to N.C. State’s steady appearances — felt disconnected from the rest of the tournament, then what of Tuesday’s entire three-game slate nowadays?
NC legislature mandates in-state tournaments
One of the reasons the ACC tournament became what it was, at its peak, was that sense of community. It was eight schools, once the entirety of the league’s membership, playing on the same day — eight groups of fans together under one roof. By the time the tournament quarterfinals start now, almost half the league’s teams have been eliminated. Amid all the changes — and they have been endless — Greensboro has attempted to keep one thing the same: the hospitality.
“The affection, the association, the excitement, the interest, the true hospitality that is generated by the community to welcome all the teams is genuine — it’s there,” said Matt Brown, who since 1994 has been the managing director of the Greensboro Coliseum “And I think everyone’s looking forward to it. I don’t think there’s a hangover from the disappointing decision that the conference presidents made to relocate the corporate headquarters office.
“It was certainly a disappointment to a community that ingrained themselves with the ACC, since 1953. So obviously from a stature standpoint, we didn’t want to see it leave, let alone go to a competing city in the state. But the fact that it remained in North Carolina is good for everyone.”
As part of a deal to keep the ACC’s headquarters in North Carolina for at least the next 15 years, the state legislature agreed to provide the conference with $15 million. The agreement mandates, among other things, that within the next 10 years, the ACC must hold at least four men’s and four women’s basketball tournaments in North Carolina. At least two of those four men’s tournaments will be in Greensboro, though the dates remain to be decided.
It’s also unclear whether the ACC will choose to come back more often than the state-mandated minimum of twice over the next decade. Since the Greensboro Coliseum hosted the ACC tournament for the first time in 1967, roughly half the tournaments over the past 56 years, including this one, have been held at the Coliseum.
“I know they’re disappointed, and I understand that,” Phillips, the ACC Commissioner, said of Greensboroians’ reaction to the conference moving its headquarters. “And no exception taken to people feeling bad about that. But they have been really warm about the future and tournament opportunities, and the rest of it.
“And we’re going to do that. We have to do that. There will only be one home of the ACC — original home. And that’s going to be in Greensboro. And we’ll start a new chapter when we go to Charlotte, but we’ll always be connected to the city and championships will be a piece of that.”
Conference’s future depends on the growth of football
Two years into his tenure with the ACC, Phillips has made no secret of the need to emphasize football. The conference’s future depends on its growth in that sport, and to what degree it can reduce the yawning financial gap with the Big Ten and the SEC, both of which have separated themselves atop the financial hierarchy of college athletics.
It could be too late. The Big Ten was first to launch its own television network, in 2007. The SEC followed. And both of those rival leagues, full of large state schools with massive alumni bases, successfully capitalized on college football’s rapid growth in popularity — at least as a television product — in the mid-2000s. The ACC’s basketball success long made it the nation’s most financially-secure conference throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, so much so that Florida State joined the league in 1992 in large part because the ACC’s basketball television rights were so lucrative.
Fast forward more than 30 years, and to late last month, and Michael Alford, the Florida State athletic director, sounded the alarm. During an FSU Board of Trustees meeting, Alford implored the university’s leadership that “something has to change” in relation to the widening financial disparity between the ACC and Big Ten and SEC. Schools from those two leagues in the coming years are set to almost double what ACC schools receive in television money — a discomforting reality especially because the ACC’s deal with ESPN runs through 2036.
Alford’s comments — “it had to be done,” he told the Tallahassee Democrat — provided another element to the strange backdrop surrounding this version of the ACC tournament. For so long the event felt like an annual celebration. Now it feels as though the conference is under siege, with discontented members undoubtedly trying to find whatever loophole they can in the league’s grant of rights agreement, which binds ACC schools to the conference for the next 13 years.
“From day one I’ve been talking about resource acquisition and business innovation, and we’re doing those kinds of things,” Phillips said. “And we’ve had some nice moments, including full distribution (of the ACC Network), which was about a year or so ago. And so, I understand.
“I understand the revenue gap. And we’re doing everything that we can, and we’ll continue to work with the membership. At the end of the day, each institution is thinking about it, themselves. And we’re thinking about it, as well.”
Greensboro will always have the history
As Phillips spoke, The Plaids were on stage in the distance, playing away while the mascots danced beneath the stage. Basketball-themed balloons hung in the air. Tournament volunteers, Greensboro locals who’ve worked at the Coliseum year after year, who’ve seen the league change and try to keep up with changes throughout college athletics, gathered before another grind began.
In a way, it really was the same as it ever was, with Tournament Town coming alive, the anticipation building. And yet it was all different, too, with an event, a city and a conference meeting at an uncomfortable moment in college athletics. It didn’t help that, for the second consecutive regular season, the ACC has carried the perception that it’s in the midst of an historic slump. It didn’t help that college basketball has become a game of transfer roulette, with rosters all but impossible for casual fans to track. It didn’t help that the sport, once the financial engine of the ACC, had been relegated to second-tier status, or that college sports’ Power Five was really becoming a Power Two.
“I hate that money dictates what happens,” said Bill Sullivan, 82, a Greensboro resident who has been to every men’s tournament at the Coliseum. He wore a sand-colored blazer and the pride of being part of the family who helped the Coliseum get built. Sullivan’s grandfather served as Greensboro mayor in the early 1940s, and was among the first in the city who envisioned building an arena of the Coliseum’s caliber. After it opened in 1959, Sullivan’s father helped manage and lead it. Almost 50 years ago the younger Sullivan, then in his early 30s, was among those in the Coliseum for the classic N.C. State-Maryland game.
“A lot of things have changed,” he said. “Some for the better. But we’ll take what we can get. This place right here was a dream of my grandfather’s. And it turned out to be something.”
All around the room at the welcome party, there were people like Sullivan, those who grew up around here, and grew up with ACC basketball at the Greensboro Coliseum. The ACC tournament is different here because the connections are deeper here.
Indeed, the Coliseum “turned out to be something,” as Sullivan put it.
It became home to an abundance of North Carolina sporting history. In the process, it helped a conference and an entire sport grow into what college basketball once was, at its height. The state of the ACC tournament these days is up for debate — depending on which schools advance to Friday and Saturday, the Coliseum may well be as lively as ever.
At the least, though, Greensboro will always have the history. That’s one thing they can’t take away.
This story was originally published March 3, 2023 at 6:00 AM.
