Closing Shot: Remembering a Leader

In addition to his role at the ACC, Gene Corrigan served as NCAA president and as the athletic director at Notre Dame, Virginia and Washington and Lee.courtesy of the acc

More than 20 years passed from the time Gene Corrigan retired as ACC commissioner in 1996 until his death at age 91 on Jan. 25, but his fingerprints are still evident on the conference he loved.

Corrigan was remembered as an intense administrator who recognized and embraced the business side of college athletics and also as an affable character who could defuse tense situations, partly because he didn’t take himself too seriously.

“He’s still the only man I’ve ever seen wear a tux with no socks,” said current ACC Commissioner John Swofford, laughing.

Corrigan did it all in college athletics. He played lacrosse at Duke and later coached the sport at Virginia, where he transitioned into administration and became athletic director.

Hired by Notre Dame in 1985 to fix the school’s football program, Corrigan replaced struggling coach Gerry Faust with Lou Holtz the following year and the 1988 Fighting Irish won the national championship, although Corrigan had since left for the ACC.

During his decade as the league’s commissioner, Corrigan oversaw new TV contracts with ESPN, the addition of Florida State in the early 1990s and equal revenue sharing from bowl and TV money among the conference’s members.

“Gene is among the five most important people in my four decades” in sports media, said former ESPN executive Len DeLuca, who put Corrigan on a plane with former commissioners Jim Delany and Roy Kramer as well as the late Dave Gavitt and Walter Byers.

Corrigan, who also spent two years as NCAA president in the mid-1990s when the position rotated, spearheaded ACC expansion that continued after he left the ACC, first with Miami and Virginia Tech joining in 2004. 

“What a lot of people may not know is that we had started talking about conference expansion long before it happened,” Swofford said. “Gene was very bullish on bringing in Miami when Florida State came in. It obviously didn’t happen then, but it did later.”

Ben Sutton, the former IMG College president, worked in athletics at Wake Forest in the late 1980s when Corrigan was commissioner. Corrigan was among the first to see value and revenue potential from aggregating marketing rights in the days before multimedia rights.

“Gene understood that we all competed on the field, but we should work together off the field,” Sutton said. “He saw that if we brought our rights together, we could be so much stronger. So we created a collective marketing group, which really became the predecessor to ACC Properties. He really understood the power of the conference.”

Swofford often leaned on Corrigan.

“I was lucky because I came into a situation where the conference was in great shape,” Swofford said. “One of the biggest things I thought about was how to maintain things from a cultural standpoint. His legacy in my mind will always be the relationships he built and how he treated people, regardless of their position.”