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Congrats to the Diamond Heels, a very good but not great baseball team.
As the NIL era continues to evolve and mature at major colleges, you get the feeling the acronym doesn’t stand for Name-Image-Likeness as much as it means Not In (their) League for schools that can’t keep pace with the SEC and Big Ten.
Of all four ACC teams at the College World Series that did not make it past Wednesday, the remaining SEC entries look different and play a different brand of ball. Their athletes are more buffed and bearded and seem like what they are – paid to play.
Like the class gap, wealth gap and societal gap, the college athletics gap could mean Carolina will field good teams but not as many championship teams. From the oldest and more experienced coaches like Mack Brown and Anson Dorrance on down to the great Olympic sports programs.
UNC is competing, all right, with its brand awareness, alluring campus and men and women who love the games they play. But the money gap is also widening and schools that raise more NIL funds will continue to show that result on the fields and the courts.
It is hard to say who was best in the ACC this baseball season, even though the Tar Heels under fourth-year head coach Scott Forbes won the regular season title. They did not play Florida State, which beat them soundly in Omaha, after they were pummeled by Tennessee, the top-seeded team in the College World Series.
Forbes has done an excellent job keeping the program at the postseason level, but unlike the Mike Fox juggernaut era Carolina is relying on more very good transfers from outside the power conferences and in some cases from Division 2 and 3 schools.
Vance Honeycutt emerged from a prep travel team in which he batted eighth in the lineup to a heroic longball threat and likely a mid-first round pick in the next MLB Draft. One scout who attended the regional rounds in Chapel Hill said Honeycutt has a high 27 percent chase rate of swinging at bad pitches and misses too often. The Heels’ 114 homers tied for 15th in the NCAA; five SEC teams and three ACC teams hit more.
In the NIL arms race, most ACC coaches in all sports are finding their job descriptions to include raising money, and their programs are not close to what many SEC schools apparently have to lure athletes. That could affect UNC winning percentages in the future.
Featured image via Associated Press/Nati Harnik
Art Chansky is a veteran journalist who has written ten books, including best-sellers “Game Changers,” “Blue Bloods,” and “The Dean’s List.” He has contributed to WCHL for decades, having made his first appearance as a student in 1971. His “Sports Notebook” commentary airs daily on the 97.9 The Hill WCHL and his “Art’s Angle” opinion column runs weekly on Chapelboro.Chapelboro.com does not charge subscription fees, and you can directly support our efforts in local journalism here. Want more of what you see on Chapelboro? Let us bring free local news and community information to you by signing up for our newsletter.
“In the NIL arms race, most ACC coaches in all sports are finding their job descriptions to include raising money, and their programs are not close to what many SEC schools apparently have to lure athletes. That could affect UNC winning percentages in the future.” Chansky
How does UNC unilterally de-escalate a war it cannot win?
It is insane for the ACC to attempt to compete with the pros in the SEC and Big 10.
Little Johnny screwed the ACC bigly and that screwing can only stop when the former ACC of North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia and South Carolina re-group into a more logically coherent geographical conference and return to a more student-athelete framework.
Let our Southern siters go, and let’s find a buinsess model where $120 million in revenue works for the students.
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