Four weeks in August: How NC State went from ACC expansion skeptic to voting to allow it

On the afternoon of Aug. 9, hours before leaders of ACC schools met again to discuss expansion, Ed Weisiger, the chairman of the N.C. State’s Board of Trustees, sent a text message to Randy Woodson, the university chancellor. The two often remained in contact throughout August, the month that decided the ACC’s future, and now Weisiger wanted Woodson to have the latest.

“I heard about this today,” Weisiger wrote, and “wanted you to be aware though you probably know about this.”

What he was about to send was an unsolicited entreaty from his counterpart at Southern Methodist University, an outline of a deal that at first seemed outlandish. Weisiger referred to it as “bizarre” and “not believable.” Soon enough, though, it would come to change the entire future of the ACC.

The exchange between Weisiger and Woodson surfaced among the hundreds of pages of documents N.C. State recently released to The News & Observer in response to a public records request. The emails, drafts of statements and text messages detail some of the back-and-forth among decision-makers throughout August. The records don’t tell the entire story, as only Woodson and a few others know it, but they nonetheless provide the most complete accounting yet of how N.C. State came to support expansion, and how various players attempted to sway its leadership.

SMU willing to come to ACC for free? “Bizarre”

On Aug. 9, Weisiger acknowledged his skepticism about what he was about to share but here it was, nonetheless, for Woodson’s consideration: a proposal from SMU — a desperate plea — meant to sell N.C. State on the idea of expansion.

Weisiger had received the proposal earlier in the day. It arrived via email from David Miller, the chairman of the SMU board of trustees and a successful businessman who’d played football for the Mustangs in the early 1970s. If the ACC was going to expand, Miller wanted to fight for SMU’s inclusion. One of the most important steps, he knew, was convincing N.C. State it was a good idea.

“My understanding is ACC Presidents meet again tonight to discuss expansion,” Miller wrote to Weisiger. “I’d love to share my thoughts with you about what SMU and Dallas bring to the table, but also (in case you’re not aware) want to let you know that we’ve offered to come into the conference and not participate in media revenues for 7 years.

“Amounts to several hundred million dollars that can go into ‘Success Pool’. Would appear to help solve issue with bigger football programs, such as yours. We’re fortunate to have a very wealthy alumni base that is passionate about athletics and willing to underwrite whatever costs are incurred to get SMU back to Power Conference status. Sorry to be so long winded in an email but wanted to make sure you and your President were fully up to speed on this.”

Not long after Weisiger passed Miller’s pitch onto Woodson, Woodson texted back.

“Welcome to the world of folks lobbying,” he wrote, and Weisiger responded with a “haha” tapback. The next morning Woodson filled Weisiger in on the meeting of ACC presidents and chancellors from the night before: “I’ll be brief, no official vote was taken. There is not sufficient support at this time to invite new programs into the conference.”

A little more than three weeks passed before there was an official vote. The first and only one, given the resistance among some ACC members — N.C. State included — to support adding Cal, Stanford and SMU to a conference with deep North Carolina roots, and a league in which all 15 members reside in the Eastern Time Zone. Twelve of them are in states that border the Atlantic Ocean.

They destroyed the ACC, in order to save it

When news of ACC expansion became official on Sept. 1, Stanhope Kelly, a former member of N.C. State Board of Trustees, congratulated Weisiger in a text message. N.C. State, after all, had for weeks held an outsized amount of power. It initially had joined three other schools — Clemson, Florida State and North Carolina — in opposition to expansion. For it to happen, one of those schools had to change its position to give the ACC the required three-fourths majority vote.

N.C. State became the one. Kelly seemed happy with the news.

“Proud of you, the BOT, and Randy for leading the way,” he wrote to Weisiger.

“Thanks Stan,” Weisiger wrote back. “Interesting month. I appreciate your input and counsel.”

It was their first exchange in more than three weeks.

Expansion skepticism strong

On Aug. 8, Kelly had texted Weisiger asking where things stood with the ACC’s expansion talks. There’d been a lot of speculation. Weisiger responded that he’d soon be speaking with Woodson about it, and that “the long term ESPN deal (and their financial straits) make it tough for any deal to happen.”

“Adding members to the ACC requires something additive,” Weisiger wrote, “and west coast schools don’t fit that narrative. However, those schools are desperate but adding west coast travel to the athletic depts of the ACC (and vice versa) hardly makes sense. Will let you know.”

In the weeks to follow, what at first appeared to hardly make sense to N.C. State, and its leaders, gradually became more palatable. Along the way, ACC expansion, which to its opponents was a non-starter of an idea throughout the first half of August, gradually became more realistic until it finally passed. In the six weeks since it did, the question of how and why N.C. State reached its decision to support expansion has lingered. It’s a question that Woodson has avoided answering.

NC State chancellor Randy Woodson cast decisive ACC expansion vote but won’t say why

By early August, the drama was already well underway. Florida State’s board of trustees on Aug. 2 held a meeting, broadcast online, in which members shared their dissatisfaction with the ACC and intimated their desire to leave the conference, barring a drastic increase in revenue and a change in its distribution. The next day, Bubba Cunningham, the athletics director at North Carolina, said in a radio interview with Adam Gold that FSU’s “barking” was bad for the conference.

Paula Gentius, Woodson’s Chief of Staff, sent Woodson a story about Cunningham’s comments.

“Thanks, Paula,” Woodson emailed in response. “A lot going on right now. I’ve been on the phone quite a bit with members of the ACC.”

The same day, Aug. 4, Woodson and the other 14 presidents and chancellors of ACC schools received an invitation to a “special meeting of the ACC Board of Directors,” to be held virtually starting at 9 o’clock that night. “The topic of the meeting,” the invitation said, “will be potential additions to the ACC’s membership.”

A month of frequent meetings

For Woodson and others throughout the ACC — administrators in the league office, chancellors and presidents and athletics directors at member schools — August was a month of meetings. Endless meetings. Sometimes in the morning. Often in the evening. Officials often met daily, and sometimes, toward the end of the month, several times per day.

“Was starting to miss you guys,” Jim Ryan, the University of Virginia President, wrote in a text message to Woodson and others on Aug. 22, responding to yet another meeting invitation. “So glad we could get together again.”

The meeting invites popped up in email inboxes and on virtual calendars with titles like “ACC connect” and “ACC discussion” and “ACC update” and, when the conversation was apparently at its most serious and formal: “A special meeting of the ACC Board of Directors” to discuss “potential additions to the ACC’s membership.”

The first of those was Aug. 4 and the second on Aug. 9. University presidents met and talked, with ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips and others, but took no formal vote on expansion. There was no need to, in the absence of the necessary support to expand. The talks could’ve ended there, or in the weeks after, if the league’s four holdouts remained united in their opposition.

Those who favored expansion, though, needed to convince only one of those schools that it was the right move. But which one? FSU had become the ACC’s most vociferous critic, its petulance and angst a growing and festering sore spot among league administrators and rival schools. Clemson had been quieter in its criticism but, like FSU, had expressed concern about its ability to compete as the ACC’s revenue disparity with the SEC and Big Ten continued to grow.

UNC, meanwhile, understood its place as the most desired of ACC members, if the league were ever to crumble like the Pac-12. Administrators at North Carolina made no secret of their skepticism surrounding ACC expansion, their belief that adding West Coast schools was more trouble than it was worth. That left N.C. State. If any of the schools opposed to expansion was going to change its position, State seemed the most obvious candidate.

Adding Cal, Stanford and SMU is the best bad idea the ACC has

An expert voice weighs in

It was during a rare lull in conference meetings, toward the middle of August, when Weisiger received an impassioned plea from an old friend. It came via a text message, but it was one of those texts that was so long that Weisiger’s iPhone opened it in a separate window. It was from Ben Sutton, a prominent Wake Forest alumnus (with both an undergraduate and law degree) and booster who founded ISP Sports, which in the 1990s became arguably the most influential college sports media and marketing company in the United States.

Sutton remains one of the most powerful behind-the-scenes influencers in college athletics. Among his friends he counts athletics directors and school presidents and conference commissioners and television and media executives around the country. In mid-August, with the ACC’s expansion talks having stalled, Sutton’s text to Weisiger arrived in capital letters:

“APOLOGIES FOR THE LENGTH, BUT WANTED YOU TO HAVE INFO I HAVE SHARED WITH MULTIPLE PRESIDENTS AND AD’s OVER THE PAST WEEK.”

The crux of his long message quickly became clear enough: the ACC could no longer wait.

“We’ve all been watching this movie for 25 years as the ACC consistently waited for others to make the first move and by the time the league’s leaders decided to respond, they were totally reactionary and playing for 3rd and 4th place in a 5 horse race,” Sutton wrote. He soon summarized his argument in three sentences:

“The ACC has to expand. And now. It is entirely about setting yourself up for the next move (one of the definitions of strategy).” To Sutton, the ACC’s choices were clear. It could either “ultimately get eaten up,” as he wrote, “or you can play the game.” And the game was “to be the #3 conference in terms of revenue output and one of only three bona fide, financially stable national conferences.”

Allowing expansion, Sutton argued, would be “like buying insurance for the future members of the ACC. The ACC contract with ESPN requires 14 full members in the league. If Carolina and Virginia leave, by taking Cal and Stanford, you take no haircut. If FSU goes independent (they are seriously considering it), SMU could fill the gap.”

In the long term, Sutton envisioned a time, after the Big 12’s television rights deal expires in six years, when the ACC could target TCU and West Virginia. Do that, his message went, and it “ensures the ACC exists until such time as a ‘top down’ solution comes in college football (it surely will in the next 3-10 years) whereby the top 24-36 teams form their own alliance and everyone else scrambles to develop the next level.”

Sutton throughout the past several decades has often successfully envisioned the direction of major college athletics. He founded ISP Sports at the right time in the early 90s, when media rights deals first began to create the kind of unimaginable wealth that has defined and shaped the industry since. He sold ISP to IMG College in 2010, and then guided the sale of that division of IMG, for $2.4 billion, in 2014.

The same business forces that have made Sutton wealthy — he donated $15 million to Wake Forest in 2016 for a sports performance center that now bears his name — are the same ones that have upended college athletics. Money, and the pursuit of it, led to the destruction of the Pac-12. And now the ACC was facing an existential crisis, too.

“At least from my perspective, nobody wants to see the ACC blow up,” Sutton said in a recent interview. “ ... And I love the Big Four, and it doesn’t get talked about enough any more, but I love those rivalries, and I miss being able to see my Demon Deacons play all three of those schools every year in football.”

But now, to Sutton, it had become about survival and positioning. With the Pac-12, “It’s terrible,” he said, “to see the demise of that league.

“And you know, I frankly just personally didn’t want to see the ACC become that. If I put my Wake Forest hat on ... I didn’t want to see us on the outside looking in.”

About an hour and a half after Sutton’s text, Weisiger responded with a “thanks.”

“Consistent with our conversation last week,” he wrote. “Good points and reasonable. Not sure we’re not dealing with some provincial viewpoints. Still working it.” The next morning, after spending a night with all the arguments in favor of expansion, Weisiger texted Woodson: “I had an additional thought about the ACC situation. No urgency.”

NC State’s pivotal position

Amid the turmoil and speculation surrounding the ACC, both Woodson and Boo Corrigan, the N.C. State athletics director, attempted to quell any unrest. Corrigan on Aug. 6 sent an email to his department in which he wrote, “With all the craziness surrounding conference affiliation over the past week, I wanted to reach out and let everyone know that NC State Athletics will be fine.”

“While things around us continue to change, the best thing we can do is push to reach higher levels. We will continue to monitor the landscape of college athletics and will keep you informed.”

Five days later, on Aug. 11, Woodson emailed the university’s trustees, assuring them that the ACC’s presidents were “working to make sure that we remain a strong and competitive power five conference.” Woodson expressed hope that the league’s long term contract with ESPN, despite its financial limitations, would provide stability.

There hadn’t been a formal vote on expansion, he wrote, “with a number of members concerned about spreading the conference and our student-athletes thin by bringing in universities outside our traditional footprint.” Woodson described his position as “very simple.”

“I want a strong and successful ACC and I would like to see us address the issues we have as a conference including revenue, revenue sharing and through this, stability.”

As late in the month as Aug. 19, Woodson expressed doubt that expansion was the right move for the ACC, or N.C. State. He shared his skepticism in an email exchange with Lou Bissette, an Asheville lawyer who earned his undergraduate degree from Wake Forest, his law degree from UNC and an MBA from Virginia. Bissette, a former Asheville mayor who also served as the chairman of the UNC System Board of Governors, contacted Woodson several times, at one point urging him to “please save the ACC.”

On Aug. 19, Bissette emailed Woodson again, writing:

“I am still hoping that Boo will come to his senses and help preserve the ACC. How does it help NCSU and the State of North Carolina to lose the Atlantic Coast Conference whose epicenter is in our State and allow the future of college athletics in North Carolina to be decided in the Midwest and/or the Deep South. The Big Four needs to take a leadership role in preserving the ACC by approving the proposed expansion! NCSU needs to lead in that effort!”

Woodson replied quickly.

“I appreciate your input,” he wrote. “I can assure you, NC State and UNC-CH are pushing very hard to preserve the ACC. Expanding to the West Coast with only two teams is a real stretch in terms of preserving the conference and providing a great academic and educational experience for our student athletes.”

Bissette emailed again, reaffirming his argument, writing that UNC would be fine no matter what happened but “with all due respect to The Pack, you may have a little more of a problem if the ACC collapses.” He closed his email with, “Please keep an open mind! I will now leave you alone for a while.”

Go West, young man

Less than two weeks after acknowledging that a West Coast expansion would be “a real stretch,” Woodson voted in favor of it, pushing expansion past the finish line but just barely. He has declined to speak in depth about why he supported it — deferring questions to the league office — but Woodson did say recently, after a Centennial Authority meeting, that the deal surrounding expansion changed, and thus so did N.C. State’s outlook on it.

On Aug. 21, the conference scheduled two 30-minute meetings, one at 4:30 p.m. and another at 9 p.m. Woodson texted Weisiger the next day, writing, “Ed, do you have time for a quick call? ACC matters.” Between Aug. 21 and Aug. 28, the conference scheduled at least 11 meetings among presidents, athletic directors and other officials.

Sometimes they were in smaller groups, like the one on Aug. 23 among Ryan (the Virginia President), Woodson, Phillips (the ACC Commissioner), UNC Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz, Clemson President Jim Clements and Ben Tario, the ACC’s Chief Financial Officer. Sometimes, the meetings came about spur of the moment, like when Phillips texted both Woodson and Guskiewicz early the morning of Aug. 27 for a meeting with the two of them.

“Good morning! Happy Sunday! The Sabbath!” Phillips wrote, adding a prayer hands emoji. “Just doubling back for a quick call this morning to update you on plan for next 36 hours as well as send you a short document to review that we believe captures this proposal under consideration.”

He signed off his text, as always, with “Go ACC - Jim.”

By then what for weeks seemed to be “a real stretch” — what at first was characterized as something that “hardly makes sense” — was turning into a reality. SMU was poised to join the ACC without media revenues for seven years. Cal and Stanford were willing to come at a discounted rate. The additions would mean more revenue for the ACC, and its existing members, though hardly enough to account for the widening financial disparity with Big Ten and SEC.

In the days before the one and only vote, optics became a concern.

“This may be immaterial,” Ryan wrote in a text to Phillips and the ACC school presidents, “but I wonder if it’s worth raising with the powers that be in NC that we could structure the vote so it’s a done deal before UNC votes, and UNC simply abstains. Would be easy to set it up this way. Maybe that’s not sufficient alignment but it’s less opposed than a yes and a no vote.”

On Aug. 28, Woodson texted Phillips.

“Can I call you later?” Woodson asked.

“Sure. Not urgent,” Phillips replied. Woodson tried calling to no avail before Phillips texted back.

“Randy — Go home and enjoy being home!” he wrote. “Nothing urgent on my end. Just wanted you/Jim R to know that there is a growing group of CEO’s that are taking a stance on not supporting anything related to success initiative if this combo (expansion/success initiative) package does not go through. They are not interested in anything other than an equal distribution of all funds as we move ahead (CFP, basketball, media, etc.).

“Not necessarily surprising but important as we look ahead if this proposal (expansion/success initiative) does not pass.”

That same day, a Monday, the ACC had scheduled three meetings with presidents. The on-campus shooting and death of a faculty member at UNC led to the postponement of an afternoon and evening meeting, where an expansion vote might’ve taken place. Instead it came that Friday, Sept. 1, during a meeting that began at 7 a.m.

Soon enough, Phillips was back in the group text with the presidents and chancellors.

“You should now have received an email from the ACC as this decision and announcement has been rolled out publicly. ...

“Go ACC - Jim.”

Along with the text, Phillips sent a map of the United States, with ACC logos filling those states with conference schools. There was a big SMU mustang covering Texas, and Cal and Stanford logos splitting California.

“Nice,” one of the presidents replied, with a thumbs-up emoji.

Managing the optics

The night before the vote became official, Fred Hartman, an N.C. State assistant Vice Chancellor who is serving as the university’s interim Chief Communications Officer, sent Woodson “a proposed draft statement ... in line with talking points we created with Athletics.”

“I recommend a brief, positive statement focused on benefits to NC State and let Boo use the longer talking points to handle messaging around finances, logistics etc. — and let the ACC handle questions about the vote, impact to the league etc etc.,” Hartman wrote.

“Sounds good,” Woodson emailed back at 6:43 the morning of the vote. “Please answer media inquiries with this statement, and point them to the conference office for details of the agreements. Boo and his team have the talking points and will deal with the athletic media.”

About an hour later, Woodson wrote to Hartman and Corrigan, emphasizing confidentiality “until the new members have signed the agreements.” As Woodson put it, “we need to wait for the green light from the ACC (next 1-2 days).”

It was far too late for that. Corrigan wrote back an hour later: “Already hit the media through Pete Thamel with espn. Absolutely no idea why nothing is sacred with information.”

So began the onslaught of reaction that soon spread throughout social media. Depending on one’s perspective, Woodson either saved the ACC or doomed it. His inbox began filling with reaction. One wrote to him called it “mind boggling,” asking Woodson to explain the “positive affect (sic) to our athletes traveling across the country to play teams no other conference wanted.” Another praised Woodson, happy for “NC STATE to lead the way!”

Another, who claimed to be a 1991 N.C. State graduate, sarcastically thanked Woodson for “killing the ACC. ... The disappointment and shame I feel is too big to measure.” Wrote another who said he was a State graduate: “I was so proud as a fan and an alumnus that our school was one of the handful to stand up to the ridiculous idea of making the ACC into the All Coasts Conference.

“And then you caved ...”

Woodson responded to some of the emails by copy and pasting the talking points the ACC had provided earlier that morning, highlighting the benefits of expansion, according to the league. When a member of his staff shared an ESPN story that characterized Woodson as having “flipped,” he rejected the use of the word.

“I didn’t ‘flip,’” he wrote, “as there was no vote before. The final vote was on a deal that was very different from the one originally presented with NC State’s concerns having been addressed.”

Woodson hasn’t detailed what those concerns were, or how they were addressed. Documents in the record, meanwhile, show that he was skeptical of expansion. And then he wasn’t.

When pressed on the matter in person, Woodson repeatedly said he would defer all comment on expansion to the ACC because “we agreed that the ACC would be the spokesman” and “that’s the conference’s role.” But in Phillips’ Sept. 1 text telling the presidents the deal was final, he encouraged the group to “provide your own exciting and positive perspective to the public!”

Weisiger, the trustees chairman whose last name is on one of N.C. State’s athletics facilities, recently agreed to an interview and said, “First off, this was not a straightforward decision.”

“It was never a straightforward decision. It required a lot of thought and to Randy’s credit, a lot of counsel that he sought from a lot of people ... the point I would just really want you to leave with is that Randy has the delegated authority to make this decision, alone.

“He didn’t make it alone. He made it seeking a lot of input.”

Weisiger declined to address specifics about the finances of the deal, but emphasized that SMU didn’t become a serious expansion candidate until after the initial talks began. And that Cal and Stanford made concessions later in the process that allowed the ACC’s existing members to benefit more from expansion than they would have otherwise.

Quid pro quo for NC State?

Another question, too, has emerged since the vote: Was N.C. State made any promises for agreeing to say yes to expansion?

In saying yes, did it receive an assurance, for instance, that some of its rival schools would support its admission into the Association of American Universities, which is perhaps the most prestigious organization in higher education?

“I don’t think there were any promises made, I don’t think there were any promises offered, to the best of my knowledge,” Weisiger said. “I do tell you this, is that N.C. State has a lot of respect for the AAU. We have a trajectory that academically and otherwise puts us on a path to hopefully be attractive to a group of schools like that.

“But never did that enter in conversations that I had with any parties and other people.”

If that’s true — if N.C. State wasn’t compelled to vote yes in hopes of AAU membership — then the next most-likely explanation is that it came to believe supporting expansion afforded the best chance at long term stability and growth. Stability, at least, is an increasingly valuable commodity in a major college athletics landscape that grows more volatile all the time.

Two years ago, the SEC announced its intention to add Oklahoma and Texas. Last year, the Big Ten poached USC and UCLA from the Pac-12, and then added Oregon and Washington this year, leading to the death of that conference as it has been known. In expanding west, first into the Central Time Zone and then into the Pacific, the ACC is following what other leagues have done.

Will the move allow N.C. State, and other schools like it, to secure a place at the table in major college sports? Or will it further destabilize the ACC, and hasten the departures of schools that rejected expansion? There are arguments for both.

“I tell people, this situation is so fluid,” Weisiger said. “You know, three years from now, five years from now, this could look like a wonderful decision. Or it could look like a horrible decision. But I do know it was the best decision for the short term. At least, I agreed with the chancellor on that. ...

“But in terms of answering the rest? I mean, it’s a ‘who knows’ on the rest of all that.”