Luke DeCock: ACC asserts what control it still has with injury report, court-storming rules

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Wake Forest Demon Deacons fans storm the court after a win Duke Blue Devils at Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum on Feb. 24, 2024, in Winston Salem, North Carolina. Wake Forest won 83-79. (Grant Halverson/Getty Images/TNS)

Luke DeCock, The News & Observer (Raleigh)

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- By the time Jim Phillips finished announcing the ACC's new rules requiring injury reports in several sports on Tuesday morning, was North Carolina's entire football roster already listed as questionable?

Tom Brady once spent six years on Bill Belichick's injury report with the New England Patriots without missing a game. If Belichick thought he was finally out from under the NFL's draconian reporting rules, he learned otherwise the first day of the ACC's annual football kickoff, although the new UNC coach won't actually be physically present in Charlotte until Thursday.

Tuesday was the commissioner's day, and amid the usual polemic and bluster, spinning and dodging, facts and figures, Phillips did announce two new league policies of import. Not only will football, men's and women's basketball and baseball have to release injury reports well ahead of competition, schools now face a series of escalating fines for court- and field-stormings in football and basketball -- a policy some other conferences have pursued but the ACC had avoided adopting.

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Why now?

"The frequency," Philips told the News & Observer. "I've seen it a lot more in our league, in the ACC, than I have in the past."

Over the past two years, North Carolina had to flee the court at both Syracuse and Georgia Tech while Duke was caught up in crowds after losing at Clemson this spring and, famously, Wake Forest in 2024.

Under the Kyle Filipowski Memorial Court Safety Policy -- not the official legislative language -- visiting teams have to be given time to exit the field of competition or the host school will face escalating fines of $50,000, $100,000 and $200,000 for each successive instance over a two-year period.

Those postgame security plans must now also be reviewed by a third party, which should obviate a repeat of the inadequate set-up at Wake Forest that led to the Filipowski Drama in February 2024.

Phillips specifically mentioned Filipowski getting run into by Deacon fans and injured as one of the precipitating incidents that led to the adoption of the new policy. He also noted, correctly, that it's an issue that's often felt more acutely by two schools within the ACC more than the other 16. Phillips also said Clemson's longstanding fans-on-the-field postgame football celebration meets the ACC's new standard.

"Paying closer attention there is something we've done privately," Phillips said. "We haven't been as public about it. It's time. We're seeing more and more of that happen. I'm seeing it more and more in basketball. It seems to happen a lot to Duke and North Carolina but we have to protect our student-athletes across all of our 18 programs."

The injury reports are designed to help insulate athletes from prying gamblers and remove any temptation to sell or barter compromising information, which is the same reason the NFL has had comprehensive, mandatory injury reports for three generations. Naturally, the same college football coaches who don't even want to release a depth chart may not see it that way, and many pushed back during an earlier ACC iteration of the policy -- Belichick's not-immediate UNC predecessor Larry Fedora in particular.

Nevertheless, Phillips said there were compelling reasons to pursue both long-overdue policies.

"It's not a Pollyanna statement, look at us, all that," Phillips said. "It ends up coming back to the safety piece of it. The safety of student-athletes. Safety when it comes to gambling. Safety when it comes to court- and field-storming. Safety when it comes to too many games in a playoff."

On that note, at a time when expansion of the College Football Playoff seems stalled as the power conferences wrangle behind the scenes, when consideration of NCAA basketball tournament expansion is annually tabled, when the entire industry is awash in the uncertainty of how the House settlement will be implemented, taking these actions also feels like a way for the ACC to reassert control in a moment when its hold over schools and coaches and athletes may not be as strong as it once was.

With so much going on the ACC can't control, it found a couple areas it can.

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