It was a frigid evening in Evanston, Ill., when Purdue met Northwestern in November 2017. The game-time temperature at Ryan Field was 36 degrees. Snow ringed the field.
“At Northwestern, at Ryan Field, when you’re playing a November game up there, it feels like you’re in Siberia,” said Purdue athletic director Mike Bobinski, formerly the AD at Georgia Tech.
Wrapped in an overcoat, Bobinski stayed on the field for half of the first quarter, as he recalled, before common sense got the better of him and he retreated to the warmth of the press box.
Not so his counterpart at Northwestern, Jim Phillips. And, not only that, but Phillips was dressed in his unchanging game-day attire – white dress shirt, striped purple tie and navy slacks – and watched the entire game from his standard spot behind the north end zone.
“I’m like, This guy, he’s half off his rocker,” Bobinski said.
It was what Phillips did at Northwestern, where he served 13 years as AD before becoming commissioner of the ACC in February. Phillips gave his pregame time to other constituents – donors, sponsors, media, bowl officials and the like – but once games began, he was committed to support the Wildcats, win or lose, Siberia or shine.
Trey Klock, who played on the offensive line for the Wildcats in 2017-18 as a graduate transfer after playing two seasons at Tech, interpreted Phillips’ constant presence and his attire as a symbol of solidarity.
“We’re out there in short sleeves, having to show how tough we are as offensive linemen, and he’s out there doing the same thing,” Klock said. “Just a sign of respect.”
As Phillips begins his tenure, following the highly-praised 24-year reign of John Swofford, that show of support may be indicative of the priorities that he brings to the league offices in Greensboro, N.C. As Phillips takes leadership of the ACC, challenges and issues such as increasing revenue generation, the rights of athletes to profit off their name, image and likeness, the potential expansion of the College Football Playoff and the always-looming question about the possibility of Notre Dame joining the ACC for football are among the many concerns for which he’ll need to develop solutions and answers.
While the stakeholders are many, Phillips is seen as someone who will be guided first by a desire to do right by the ACC’s roughly 10,000 athletes. It’s rhetoric that anyone who wants to keep his or her job in college athletics can probably recite while asleep, but it’s central to Phillips’ approach.
“I don’t believe in any way, shape or form believe that those are just words,” Bobinski said of Phillips’ commitment to serving college athletes. “I think that is truly who he is.”
Expressed in far more ways than physical presence, that support lent to a number of successes at Northwestern. In his tenure, the men’s basketball team made its first NCAA Tournament appearance, the football team won its first bowl game since 1949 (and has now won four in a row) and the women’s lacrosse team won four national championships. He led fundraising for a $110 million renovation of the basketball arena and a $270 million construction of a fieldhouse and athletics center that overlooks Lake Michigan. Phillips was named the inaugural chairman of the NCAA Division I council in 2015 and was the first-ever sitting AD on the NCAA board of directors and board of governors. He has steadily worked his way up the college sports administration ladder since graduating from Illinois in 1990.
“John Swofford was around for a long time. He knew everybody, everybody knew him,” Bobinski said. “Jim is equally connected as John might have been. He’s going to bring all those relationships, all those contacts. He’s really well-liked and respected by all those parties.”
Raised in Chicago (he attended the same high school as Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski, Weber High, an all-male Catholic school), Phillips was long seen as a potential successor to former Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany, a position that ultimately went to Kevin Warren in June 2019. While happy at Northwestern, he acknowledged having an eye on a commissionership and preparing himself for a potential opportunity. When Swofford announced his retirement in June 2020, Phillips said he was at first sad because of his respect and admiration for him.
“And then a couple days later, I honestly started to think about it from a different perspective,” Phillips said. “And that is that that would be just a tremendous, tremendous opportunity.”
He was announced as Swofford’s successor in December. Phillips assumed the office in February, the first in the seat not to have graduated from an ACC school or been an AD within the conference. His goals, in his words: “a continuation of the upward trajectory of the ACC” and supporting athletes. Phillips and wife, Laura, have two children who are themselves college athletes, one in the ACC. Luke is a junior on the Notre Dame track team. Meredith is a freshman on the Yale soccer team.
“That’s part of the core of what you want to do, and that is to provide these transformational opportunities for a group between the ages of 18 and 22, for the most part, that you hope will change the trajectory and change the rest of their lives for the better,” Phillips said.
Klock experienced Phillips’ investment from the day he visited Northwestern as a transfer in 2017. While on his visit, Klock and his parents met with Phillips for about 45 minutes, Klock remembered. Klock said the two shared what he called “an incredible talk,” and then at the end, Phillips gave him his business card with his cellphone number with an offer to call or text with any questions.
In his two years with the Wildcats, Klock met with him a number of times as he was pursuing a career in the sports industry. Phillips offered advice and set up interviews for Klock, who now has a sales job for HydroWorx, a maker of underwater treadmills.
“Dr. Phillips was just, like, a huge, huge help and a sense of relief when I was going through (the job search),” Klock said.
Yellow Jackets wide receiver Kyric McGowan, who arrived from Northwestern in January as a grad transfer, had a similar experience. Phillips was someone who often went on to the field or basketball court when an athlete was injured. Phillips sometimes texted McGowan and other Northwestern athletes, McGowan said, checking in to make sure they were physically and mentally OK.
Phillips and his wife annually invited all 19 of Northwestern’s teams to their home for dinner out of a desire to create within the athletic department the same family environment that they had grown up in; Phillips is one of 10 children, Laura one of seven. (They have five children.)
Phillips was omnipresent at Wildcats games, not only football but across the athletic department.
“He really put us first,” McGowan said. “He was always there for us, no matter what.”
Bobinski saw that priority demonstrated over the past year as the Big Ten wrestled over the same issues of returning to play and establishing health and safety protocols that the rest of college athletics faced. While league and school officials voiced their desire to put athletes’ health first, Phillips was there when discussions strayed from that objective.
“And I saw him stand up many times on that front, when maybe we were thinking about, Well, maybe we should do this,” Bobinski said. “He’s like, Here’s what we said. Let’s stick to that.”
That perspective will assuredly inform his stance on any number of issues he’ll tackle as ACC commissioner. Regarding the possible expansion of the four-team College Football Playoff, for instance, Phillips noted that a bigger field would be more accessible for not just power-conference teams but also the remainder of FBS. However, Phillips – who said he does not have a position on the issue as he listens and learns on the matter – stressed the need to consider all consequences of expansion.
“The other side is, do the student-athletes really want more games?” he said. “We polled the student-athletes at Northwestern the last couple years, and that’s not something that they wanted, and I think that that was the case for a lot of schools, really.”
Helping land on an amenable solution for that issue and others may require putting into action what he calls a favorite phrase of his – “seeing around the corner.” He is in the midst of it now, with the issue of name, image and likeness and the NCAA’s legislation on ending the one-year residency requirement for transfers on the front burner. He mentioned the possibility of cost-cutting measures for athletic departments such as different approaches to team travel and scheduling.
“So I think seeing around the corner can have a lot of different meanings to it,” Phillips said. “But it’s important for the conference office, the commissioner, to be mindful of that responsibility.”
Bobinski described Phillips as high-energy, full of enthusiasm, well-connected, highly principled and a consensus builder. In the chair that Swofford led so effectively from, Phillips will tap into those skills, ever mindful of his young constituents.
“I’ve never been distracted at the heart of what I’m doing is all about,” he said. “And in this position, the magnitude is 15 times.”
