ACC Still Holding Off on Private Equity Despite Big 12 Leap

AMELIA ISLAND, Fla. — The ACC is still not ready to embrace PE. 

That was the gist of an answer from ACC commissioner Jim Phillips on Wednesday.

Front Office Sports asked Phillips at the ACC spring meetings about a majority of Big 12 schools saying they aren’t yet taking a $30 million line of credit offered through that conference’s landmark private-capital deal. 

“To date, there’s nothing that has made sense,” Phillips said. “And so we’ll look at it again—in fact we’ll talk about it next week in Charlotte—but there’s nothing that has been put forward that interests us.”

Phillips added, “We’ve looked at the RedBird deal, I’m happy for [Big 12 commissioner] Brett [Yormark] that he got that done, he worked hard on that, that’s what he wanted to do for his league. And we know what that looks like for the ACC. But that just hasn’t been something our group has wanted to do.”

Big 12 school presidents approved the conference’s deal with RedBird Capital Partners and Weatherford Capital (founded by former FSU quarterback Drew Weatherford) that includes a $12.5 million infusion into the conference, opportunity to coinvest in new revenue opportunities for the conference, and a line of credit for up to $30 million for each individual school. 

The schools have a year to choose to take that offer, but at this time, 13 of the 16 member schools say they are not taking it, while the remaining schools are not commenting. No Big 12 school has yet said it is taking the money. (RedBird IMI, in which RedBird Capital Partners is a joint venture partner, is the primary investor in Front Office Sports.) 

Still, the deal provides an example for how other conferences might accept or make available to their schools money from private-equity partners.

Phillips certainly left the door open for the ACC to still entertain a similar deal.

“We have had a lot of education for our presidents on the PE space,” he said. “We’ve brought in an awful lot of those kinds of groups and experts, and my job as commissioner is to educate the board, engage in discussion, and then garner their feedback and go off of that and move forward … and I think we have an awful lot of really bright, sophisticated finance presidents and chancellors in our group.”

Last summer, Phillips told FOS, “Our group is very educated about it, and there just hasn’t been anything that really has made sense for the ACC.” It appears that the conference and its members remain unswayed nearly a year later, despite arguably its most comparable peer making the jump.