Earlier this week, the always morally dependable North Carolina legislature filed a bill, House Bill 728, which threatened to force both UNC-Chapel Hill and NC State to withdraw from the ACC if the conference boycotts the state again, according to ESPN.
The legislature has gone on the offensive in a retaliation attempt at the ACC after the conference pulled all neutral-site tournament and championship games out of North Carolina due to HB2, which infamously discriminated against the LGBTQ community.
This decision to pull the games cost North Carolina hundreds of millions of dollars in both revenue and economic impact. That being said, the state legislature has every right to be upset with both the ACC and the NCAA; I was too. However, while this bill is most likely not going to pass due to it being slipped in right before the deadline, threatening the conference will not solve anything.
First of all, when you pass a discriminatory law such as HB2 in this day and age, you have to expect some backlash. It’s the 21st century. There are so many diversity movements and people pushing to be more politically correct than ever that you shouldn’t expect a grand ceremony for passing a law like that.
Secondly, the ACC and NCAA have both shown off how much power they have. The only reason HB2 was repealed in the form of HB142 this early in the first place was because the NCAA threatened to pull tournament games out of North Carolina through 2022, which would have resulted in astronomically more revenue lost on top of the money the law has already cost the state in just one year’s time.
It was shameful that it took a sports organization to get North Carolina to repeal HB2 in the first place, especially considering all the ramifications the law had brought the state outside of the sports world.
Now, despite the fact that the NCAA and ACC have shown what they can do, the North Carolina legislature continues to fight back and provoke these organizations, thereby threatening the future of sports in this state. Additionally, the NCAA already said that it would allow North Carolina to host tournament games in the future, so why threaten extensive action after a compromise was already reached?
Rep. Mark Brody, one of the primary sponsors of HB728, was very clear on the aggressive stance he and the rest of the supporters of the bill are taking.
“Now these conferences, they’re going to have to think twice about doing a boycott, especially for something that’s as out of their core mission as they did trying to influence legislation of the General Assembly,” Brody told ESPN. “If they do it again, now they’ll know there will be a price to pay.”
Like I said, it’s understandable that he is upset, but he had it coming. He went on to say the following:
“I’m sure there’s a number of conferences that would love to take North Carolina schools as well as the national champion basketball team, so [ACC presidents] need to think twice before they do this again,” Brody told ESPN.
Does he know how collegiate conferences are structured? Sure, there will be plenty of conferences that would accept these schools, but what other power-five schools would? The Big 12 and Pac-12 are already out of discussion based on location alone and even the Big Ten would be farfetched after it accepted Maryland three years ago, so that only leaves the Southeastern Conference.
The likelihood is low that the SEC would bring in both UNC and NC State considering that it would put the SEC at 16 teams; the largest conference is currently the ACC at 15. Add in the fact that it would be hard to make a case to add a school in a power five conference that was removed from its own conference because of a discriminatory law.
Not to mention that it is completely unfeasible to force a school to exit a conference that it has historically competed in. According to USA Today, when Maryland left the ACC in 2014, the university was forced to forfeit $31.4 million to move to the Big 10. Additionally, it took years of planning to fund this move. Forcing UNC and NC State to give up more than $30 million out of the blue would not only be a big blow to the programs, but could cripple the athletics departments entirely.
By filing this bill and pushing for it to pass, the North Carolina legislature is playing a dangerous game with a powerful sports organization that has already flexed its muscles and proved what it could do in the past. It would be best not to cause any future quarrels that could harm two prestigious public universities that have been valuable entities in one of the most competitive conferences in the country.
