CHARLOTTE, N.C. - The Atlantic Coast Conference is leaning harder into corporate sponsorships as commissioner Jim Phillips searches for every extra dollar he can find in a college sports economy that keeps getting more expensive.
That push has become a bigger part of the league’s financial playbook during Phillips’ five-plus years on the job. The ACC has been looking for naming-rights deals, ad sales tied to conference TV platforms and other sponsorship opportunities to help supplement the money it gets from media rights and postseason performance.
“I don’t know if it’s pressure, but it’s the reality,” Phillips said Wednesday in an interview with The Associated Press during the league's preseason football media days. “To me it’s the reality of this role and it’s reality of our league. We have to continue to find incremental dollars each and every year that continue to grow.”
The need is obvious. The ACC has continued to grow its revenue, but it still trails the Big Ten and Southeastern Conference by a wide margin. The league reported about $826.5 million in total revenue in tax filings covering the 2024-25 sports season, with schools earning a full distribution share getting an average of $47.1 million.
That was up from $617 million in 2021-22, Phillips’ first full season, when full-share schools averaged $39.4 million. Phillips said Wednesday during his annual forum that the league expects to top $900 million in total revenue for the just-completed 2025-26 season.
Even with that rise, the gap remains steep. The Big Ten and SEC both cleared $1 billion in total revenue in their 2024-25 filings, with the Big Ten paying nearly $79.9 million on average to full-share members and the SEC coming in at nearly $72.4 million.
Media rights remain the biggest lever in conference revenue, and the ACC is locked into its ESPN deal - including the ACC Network, which launched in August 2019 - through the 2035-36 season. That money is still climbing, but Phillips said some of the league’s gains have also come from sponsorship growth, including T. Rowe Price putting its name on the ACC’s longtime men’s basketball tournament.
The conference has doubled its corporate sponsorship list to nine over the past five years. Apple, Dr Pepper, Gatorade and Allstate are among the brands on that list, and on Wednesday the ACC announced a deal with AI cybersecurity firm ReliaQuest that includes advertising through ESPN, Disney and the ACC Network.
That fits alongside other revenue tweaks the league has already made, including a distribution model that rewards schools for generating higher TV viewership and the “success initiative” that lets programs keep money tied to their own postseason success.
“You can’t wait around, you can't just kind of sit on your hands as it relates to some of these other areas and not fully explore and commit to finding those additional dollars,” Phillips told the AP. “All of that stuff adds up incrementally.”
The broader industry is moving the same way, according to Bob Lynch, founder and CEO of SponsorUnited, which uses AI to track sponsorship deals across professional and college sports.
“I think everybody's starting to recognize these are businesses as well as educational institutions that need to compete and drive value," Lynch said.
SponsorUnited’s latest report estimated that Power Four schools generated about $1 billion in corporate sponsorship revenue across roughly 6,300 deals for the 2025-26 season. In that report, the ACC averaged about $9.7 million per school, while the Big 12 averaged $11.2 million after announcing a multiyear deal with Monster Energy last week. The SEC led at $21.5 million per school, followed by the Big Ten at $16.1 million.
“There’s not a lot of places where you can go to an AD and say, ‘Look I think we could potentially generate $5-10-20 million annually if we think differently about this side of the business and we can control it,'” Lynch said. “So it becomes a really intriguing space to look and say if we invest there, we could potentially extract a lot of dollars and generate a lot that we weren’t doing before."
The ACC has already taken a step in that direction by hiring Anthony Macri last September as its first chief revenue officer. Macri, who previously worked for a Formula 1 racing team and spent 10 years with the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies, is now helping the league and its schools explore everything from jersey patches to arena signage.
Unlike ticket sales, which are capped by the size of the building, sponsorships can keep expanding in layers. That’s why Macri sees so much room for growth.
“We have a chance to really grow that area,” Macri said. “It's been an underleveraged opportunity that has unlimited growth potential, so that gives us a lot of room to push on.”
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