Swofford's story

A friend recently called my attention to a lengthy article on John Swofford in a magazine called Business North Carolina.

Hadn't heard of the magazine and hadn't heard about the feature, and it's an interesting read.

Some of the more interesting passages:

-- Didn't know Swofford, then a young AD at North Carolina in the early 1980s, was present for the landmark lawsuit by Oklahoma and Georgia that allowed schools to negotiate their own TV deals.

As a member of the Football Television Committee, there was a chance he would be called to testify. A federal judge ruled against the NCAA, calling it a “classic cartel,” without Swofford taking the stand. “I would probably have come down on the side of the NCAA,” he says. “The national package through the NCAA was appropriate. I thought that at the time.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals and Supreme Court followed the lower court’s lead, freeing schools to negotiate for themselves. “A lot of people were really afraid of what would occur when that ruling came down,” says Swofford, now 63 and commissioner of the Atlantic Coast Conference. “It’s like anything else. When you have those kinds of transitions, there’s usually an opportunity where you first see an obstacle.”

-- Formed in 1953, its original seven members’ fortunes veered sharply toward the hardwood — they’ve won 12 NCAA titles in basketball and just two in football. It’s one of college basketball’s most lucrative leagues, but that’s trifling nowadays. For example, Duke University generated basketball revenue of $26.7 million in 2009-10, most of any school. Football at the University of Texas, a member of the Big 12 Conference, more than tripled that.

Given its tribulations on the gridiron, the ACC could well have shriveled into obscurity, but it clings to the final spot among the Big Five conferences thanks to John Douglas Swofford. “He’s one of the few people in college athletics who gets it,” says Barry Frank, executive vice president of New York-based IMG Media Sports Programming and an ACC consultant. “He knows what makes it tick. Money.” He also knows where to find it."

-- Did you know that Swofford had some decorated competition when he was going for the UNC AD job at the age of just 31?

Despite strong candidates such as Dave Gavitt, founder of the Big East, and Jim Jones, later athletic director at Ohio State, Carolina hired Swofford. “I don’t think I really appreciated the leap of faith they took in hiring a 31-year-old to run a major college athletic program.”

-- Swofford often gets accused of being a basketball guy, and the additions of Pitt and Syracuse were profoundly underwhelming in a football context. But the previous expansion (Miami, VT, BC) didn't exactly thrill the basketball purists in the league.

“I hope we mend fences,” Duke men’s basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski said at the time. “Because we’ve obviously gone into another person’s yard with our tractor-trailer and knocked down a few trees.”

-- Interesting takes here:

“The rumored demise of the ACC is strictly related to football,” Wake Forest University Athletic Director Ron Wellman says. “Basketball is doing well, all of our other sports are doing exceptionally well. But we’ve got to do better in football.” If the conference doesn’t get stronger, Florida State might look for greener turf elsewhere. “If this is a basketball-first league that has a lot of small universities that have trouble historically with football, could a slight economic difference today be much larger down the line?” Dave Glenn asks. “There’s going to have to be a real philosophical and financial conversation about what’s most appropriate for Florida State.”

-- Also more insight into Swofford the person in this introduction.

The death of his father, when Swofford was 13, is an unhealed wound. “I don’t have hardly any regrets in life,” he told me, “but one of the very, very few is I never had the opportunity to know my father as an adult. I’ve always been a little envious of men that have had their father.”

In high school, Swofford was a much-coveted quarterback prospect. Every ACC school wanted him, as did Annapolis, West Point and many others. He narrowed it down to UNC Chapel Hill and Georgia Tech, an independent in 1967. The Yellow Jackets were far more successful, but their coach, Bobby Dodd, retired that year. Swofford picked Carolina, a decision that put him on the path to become the school’s athletic director, then ACC commissioner.

His older brother Bill had been a popular singer. Under the name Oliver, he had two major hits — “Good Morning Starshine” and “Jean” — in as many months in 1969. Bill Swofford was diagnosed with lymphoma in the 1990s and, though his brother donated bone marrow, died in 2000.

LW