Team-building

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CLEMSON –- For years and years and years, it’s been quite popular for people in these parts to think of John Swofford as a conspiratorial adversary of anything favorable to Clemson.

Almost like the devious Mr. Burns from “The Simpsons” lore, except with hair. The fact that he’s a North Carolina grad, and was the North Carolina athletics director when Clemson’s football program was hammered with NCAA sanctions in the 1980s, created too much smoke for fans to think there can be no anti-orange fire.

But these are much different times. This is 2017, and the commissioner of this rising football power knows full well the importance of the sport to his conference’s prosperity -- if not its very existence.

Clemson and Swofford are on the same team, and the most recent example of that fact came a few weeks ago when the conference’s athletics directors gathered for the annual winter meetings.

The financials for teams that participate in the College Football Playoff are tricky. The cost to buy tickets and transport hundreds of people across the country on short notice is not cheap. And neither are the abundant bonuses that are contractually bound to coaches who manage to reach this rare playoff air.

The CFP strokes a $6 million check to conferences that are represented in the playoff. That’s an unbudgeted chunk of change that is then divided 14 ways among member schools, in the ACC’s case. That’s the normal way of doing things in the ACC and at the rest of the Power 5 conferences.

But the normal way of doing things put Clemson in a bind this year, largely because the Tigers couldn’t sell all their tickets to the Fiesta Bowl against Ohio State. So many fans had spent big money making the same trip a year earlier, and quite a few of them made the calculated gamble to save their money for Tampa.

This meant 13 other ACC schools were going to take a step forward, with checks of around $350,000, while the school responsible for that windfall was going to take a step back because of the hit from unsold tickets.

So at the winter meetings, Dan Radakovich proposed adjusting the protocol and giving Clemson a bigger chunk of the money it earned for the conference. He started with Swofford, who was cool with the idea. Then he did quite a bit of back-channel conversing with fellow athletics directors, who approved the proposal soon thereafter.

The ACC even allowed it to be effective retroactively, giving Clemson a $758,000 travel allocation that greatly helped the bottom line. Graham Neff, Radakovich’s deputy AD and his main numbers whiz, shared this with Tigerillustrated.com yesterday in a conversation about revenues and expenses from the second CFP trip in two seasons.

“That was really big,” Neff said. “Our point was that as a participant, we’re going backwards because we’re going to lose money going to Phoenix. But because we got into the CFP, the rest of the league benefits. So we wanted to know: ‘Is there a different model here?’

“Dan had to do a lot of work. And Florida State helped, because obviously they’ve kind of lived through that a little bit too. This was a move forward from the ACC to help Clemson: ‘Let’s take care of the participant who earned that.’”

The bottom line regarding Clemson’s postseason revenues this past season compared to the previous season: The athletics department is projected to walk away “only” $1.9 million in the red after a $3.13 million shortfall in 2015.

While there’s still a good discussion to be had about the fairness of host cities hitting the jackpot while participating schools lose money on the deal, it’s quite clear Clemson is doing everything it can to come up with the smartest approach possible.

A considerable portion of Clemson’s spending comes from coaches’ bonuses, which totaled $2.38 million this year compared to $2.26 million last year. But without the shrewd move by Radakovich and Neff to purchase insurance on those bonuses last August, this year’s bonus total would have been $3.41 million.

In addition, Clemson spearheaded the decision by the CFP to reduce the cost of some 700 tickets apiece that the four schools purchase for each game and comp for families and guests of players. So $550 a pop became $175 a pop, saving the participating schools about $300,000.

Also, winning the whole thing helped the bottom line in the form of merchandising sales. After losing the title game a year ago, the shirts and such sold by Clemson featured the CFP logo and thus the profits went to the CFP. But winning Round 2 brought the ability for Clemson to develop its own national championship logo and earn money from it, estimated at $700,000.

As you’re sifting through all the numbers, it’s easy to get bogged down and confused. Looking for a coherent, easily understood big-picture takeaway? It has to be Swofford and the ACC showing yet another example of being open to the preferences of their big dogs.

Once upon a time, the ACC was a basketball conference largely because basketball success brought in the most money. But – and this should not be a news flash – the paradigm changed years ago when football became by far the more popular and profitable enterprise.

This explains why Swofford, in the heat of summer realignment hysteria in 2011 and 2012, made unprecedented trips to Clemson and Tallahassee to address concerns and some very tough questions from trustees.

This explains why Swofford, unquestionably giddy after Clemson’s 31-0 dismantling of Ohio State in the Fiesta Bowl, signed off on an interview with Clemson grad Mark Packer by saying, “Go Tigers.”

Swofford and the ACC know where their bread is buttered. Thus it makes perfect sense for them to break protocol and return some favors when it makes sense to do so.

What exactly happened when he was at North Carolina in the 1980s and Clemson was getting hammered by the NCAA? We don’t know the answer to that.

But we know this: If he’s got something against Clemson these days, he’s doing a masterful job of hiding it.

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