Louisville athletics poised for Tuesday's move to ACC
Tom Jurich used a familiar anecdote to illustrate just how far University of Louisville athletics have come in the past 15 years.
He was standing against a wall, chatting with reporters in April after U of L signed a five-year, $39 million branding contract with Adidas that represented one of the five richest apparel deals in college athletics.
Louisville's athletic director, who has engineered the Cardinals' rapid rise across the spectrum of college sports, was remembering the first time he spoke to Adidas 17 years earlier about a branding deal.
"For every two pair of retail shoes we bought from them, the third I got 20 percent off," Jurich said. "That's where we started."
Nearly two decades later, U of L is on the brink of another major step into the highest echelon of college sports. On Tuesday the university and its athletics program will officially join the Atlantic Coast Conference.
A school that has worked through seven other conferences before the ACC — and done nearly everything just to get its teams on television in the past 15 years — has made it.
"The ACC is a great conference," U of L President James Ramsey said before the football team's Russell Athletic Bowl victory over ACC power Miami in December. "It provides us the expectation of stability. It's got a lot of history. … Everybody's got to skate to where the puck's going to be."
Stability
For now, the college sports landscape — and conference realignment — rests. So many dominoes have fallen in recent years that teams from as far west as Omaha, Neb., play in the Big East Conference. The Idaho football team will join the Sun Belt Conference this summer and play games in Louisiana and Georgia this fall.
U of L, which has switched from Conference USA to the Big East to the American Athletic Conference in the past decade, has its new league home set just before another wave of major changes hits college sports.
How the NCAA treats its athletes could forever be altered by O'Bannon vs. the NCAA, a case in court now, and the potential unionization of Northwestern University's student-athletes.
The very power structure that has changed its complexion so much in the past decade could drastically change again.
U of L's official assimilation into the ACC represents one of the few symbols of stability in recent NCAA news. Louisville athletics is already a national brand, with a powerhouse basketball program and a rising force in football.
The ACC, with its lucrative broadcasting agreement with ESPN and its grant of rights that locks its 15 members into the league until at least 2027, adds conference credibility for U of L. The school sorely lacked such status playing football in the Big East and C-USA and spending the past year in the AAC.
"This is the biggest news to happen to the university," said Mark Jurich, Tom's son and U of L's senior associate athletic director for development. "To think about the company that we're moving into: That's exclusive company. It allows all of our sports to compete at a national level."
U of L football has sold out its luxury suites at Papa John's Cardinal Stadium for the first time, he said, thanks to home games against defending national champion Florida State and always popular Miami. The men's basketball team has sold all of its luxury suites at the KFC Yum! Center yet again, months before the 2014-15 season.
In recent years the university has built a rowing center, expanded its baseball stadium and upgraded its softball facilities. The new soccer stadium will be completed by the end of the summer, and the capital campaign for a $14 million student-athlete academic center is under way.
As Ramsey put it in December, U of L is working its way up, starting as the "least expensive house in a nice neighborhood."
"We have to continue to challenge each other," Mark Jurich said. "We've continued to raise the bar. We have to challenge each other not to be complacent, not to have the feeling that we've made it. This has been built on hard work. We haven't made it yet. Let's strive to be the best."
Tangible differences
The question seems so rudimentary, but it's a worthwhile inquiry: What actually changes when a university joins a new conference?
In some areas, not much. In others? A lot.
For the football, basketball and other sports teams, the strength of opponents improves. The schedules become more appetizing to fans.
U of L's already nationally recognized teams add the extra credibility that comes with being in the ACC, which helps with recruiting the top high school athletes.
"It's time to go to the next level," said U of L football coach Bobby Petrino, who helped usher the Cardinals into the Big East in 2005. "It's an exciting time."
Marvin Mitchell, U of L's chief administrator for athletic academic services, said the transition requires some initial eligibility adjustments for recruiting high school athletes into the ACC.
He said the ACC also has a network of athletic representatives who meet with student services and academic support teams. That network can help U of L student-athletes with jobs and continued educational opportunities at other ACC schools.
Everything else stays the same, Mitchell said, which is fine by him.
Nine U of L sports programs posted perfect academic progress rate scores last school year, and all but four teams carried grade-point averages of 3.0 or higher.
"Our record shows we've done a pretty good job with kids doing well academically, winning awards just like the ACC is doing with its schools," Mitchell said.
The transition hit the university's marketing and external relations department a bit harder. Brent Seebohm, the associate athletic director for external relations, was tasked with rolling out the school's new ACC marketing programs.
"This elevates our Louisville Cardinals brand," Seebohm said. "It's a much more elite and powerful branding measure. That correlates to Adidas and the merchandise you'll see this fall. From a marketing standpoint, it really puts us in a new elite group of colleagues."
U of L's plans include a sweeping digital marketing campaign through social media and platforms.
The other 14 markets in the ACC will see an increased U of L marketing presence on the websites they visit, with U of L's new meetthecards.com site, promoted through video and other digital means. The goal is educating those fan bases about U of L and the city of Louisville, Seebohm said.
On social media, U of L will push campaigns called #ACCFirsts and #MyCardsMoment. The "firsts" hash tag will group Louisville fans' new experiences, and the "Cards Moment" tag is intended to capture fans' favorite Louisville memories.
Seebohm and his staff studied other universities and how they handled conference realignment. They looked at Missouri's and Texas A&M's strategies for joining the Southeastern Conference and Pittsburgh's and Syracuse's campaigns when they moved into the ACC last year.
The process started eight months ago, beginning with brainstorming and evolving into the frenetic and final preparations to market U of L as the transition begins.
"It really is a major rallying opportunity for the university at large," Seebohm said. "It elevates the pride we have for our sports and academic programs."
The party
On Tuesday the university will hold a morning news conference with Ramsey, Tom Jurich and ACC commissioner John Swofford, and each of the ACC's 15 mascots will tour the city. The painting and hanging of ACC logos on the U of L campus already has begun.
The day's events will be capped by a 5 p.m. party at Fourth Street Live! — blocks from the KFC Yum! Center, home of the basketball teams.
The intention is to celebrate stability and the notion that U of L athletics finally have made it into the highest echelon — the nice neighborhood full of expensive houses, as Ramsey puts it.
From there, U of L's coaches and administrators say, the quest to rise up the ranks of a new league begins again.
"It's going to be another learning curve," Tom Jurich said in April. "We welcome that opportunity."
Reach Jeff Greer at (502) 582-4044. Follow him on Twitter @jeffgreer_CJ.
Long road to the ACC
A look at the University of Louisville's conference affiliations:
1925-48
Kentucky Intercollegiate
1948-49
Ohio Valley
1949-64
None (independent)
1964-75
Missouri Valley
1975-95
Metro
1995-2005
Conference USA
2005-13
Big East
2013-14
The American
2014-
Atlantic Coast