Swofford, all of college athletics looking at 'moving target' as to when to start up again

By Lauren Brownlow, WRALSportsFan columnist/reporte

Some people might not be as busy with the national shutdown resulting from the COVID-19 outbreak.

ACC commissioner John Swofford, however, is not one of those people.

"There's no binging on television right now. It's an extraordinary time and an extraordinarily busy time, which I'm sure is true of a lot of people and one we could have never predicted," Swofford said when he joined The OG on Wednesday. "And it's a new way of doing business. There's something good in everything I suppose, and one of the things I've been forced to do is use certain technology and means of communication with other groups that I wasn't terribly adept at at the time, but I've learned a lot about that."

Adapting is something everyone has been doing, and college athletics is trying to do the same. In some ways, they have - for instance, the Board of Governors advanced Name, Image and Likeness legislation that's likely to pass in January, allowing college athletes to profit.

It will come with plenty of catches, though.

"I think it's fundamentally and philosophically the right place to go. I think it's something that needs to happen that we further monitor as intercollegiate athletics. It's a major change, a significant one, but I think the right one. But it's going to have its challenges, there's no question about that," Swofford said.

Swofford said there will need to be "guardrails" in place, of course. And he wants to see a federal response to make the rules uniform for everyone. Some states have passed their own NIL legislation already and it will need to be more uniform.

But there are other potential snags as well.

"The monitoring and enforcement of it is my biggest concern. I do think that it's appropriate and the right thing to do for our student-athletes, but how is it monitored, how are the guardrails - whatever those may be when it's all said and done - how are they overseen and how do you somehow monitor the - I guess they're calling them advisors now - that would be involved with this with the student-athletes to try and be helpful," Swofford said.

"So those are my biggest concerns. In college athletics, we're always concerned about the recruiting process and who's involved in it and are the wrong kinds of people involved in it. This is an area that would be concerning - could be concerning - going forward to try to keep the NIL issue out of the recruiting process."

The NIL legislation moving forward wasn't the only piece of good news to come out in a time where not much of the news is good - the ACC announced on Tuesday that the ACC Tournament would return to Greensboro in 2023.

Swofford harkened back to the surreal moment when he had to shut down the ACC Tournament six weeks ago and how badly he felt for players, fans and coaches - but also for Greensboro.

"I felt really badly for the city because it puts so much into this Tournament when it's held here. They did such a great job with it and they've had so much to do with what the Tournament is today. Personally, I felt like we need to get this back ASAP and shortly thereafter, we began sort of working through that," Swofford said. "As I spoke with our ADs and faculty reps and so forth, there was full agreement that that was the right thing to do. We didn't want to put it off any longer. It needed to be done quickly. So it's a bit of good news, certainly here in Greensboro and throughout North Carolina. Happy to get that done."

There's been discussion about whether or not the ACC Tournament will continue to return there. Swofford didn't explicitly say whether it would or not after 2023, but he did emphasize that the history of the league is important to him, as is the city itself.

He likes the current rotation that is goign on right now between New York, Washington, Greensboro and Charlotte - and another city might be added soon as well.

"I think we're in a rotation right now - we're in Washington, we're in New York, we're in North Carolina in both Greensboro and Charlotte - that's a very, very good one. We may be back in Atlanta at some point because we've certainly had success there as well," Swofford said. "But a rotation of something of that nature is important to the future of the league in my opinion, and I think in the opinion of all of the athletics directors, and I think the coaches understand it too. You don't ever want to forget your roots, and certainly this Tournament has been in Greensboro more than any other city and venue, and there's a reason for that."

That was about all the good news Swofford had seen lately, as he and the other Power 5 conference commissioners continue to communicate with each other daily and try to figure out various contingency plans for their own leagues and college athletics as a whole should this outbreak persist.

Swofford also talks to the ACC's athletic directors twice a week and once a week with each school's president. They're "building scenarios", as he said, from the worst case - where there's no football at all - to the best, where they start on time as if nothing happened.

That one's looking increasingly unlikely. But regardless, Swofford said, they can only deal with this outbreak the way the rest of the nation is - as a moving target.

"Back to play I think is certainly connected to back to campus, so to speak, and when our universities open - however you define 'open', whether that's all students coming back at a certain time like they normally would or whether it's something of a partial nature in that regard or whether it's virtual," Swofford said.

The players would need appropriate time to prepare for a season, of course. And then there's the various differing restrictions across different states. In theory, Swofford said, there could be 10 different sets of rules.

But at the end of the day, he said,the virus will make the decision.

"When it gets down to it, I think the virus, science, medicine and our government leaders will ultimately be the ones that determine when we can play games again and play games in front of fans," Swofford said. "Those of us in athletics will be the ones to determine how we go about that with the parameters we have when that time comes. It's very complex and right now, it's very much a moving target, and I think will be for a good while - which gets us back to all the various scenario planning that we're going through."