Its not whether you win or lose: it's how much the networks pay when you play the game - and the ACC is running up the score.

• Author: Mildenberg, David
• Position: Atlantic Coast Conference - Cover Story

IT'S NOT WHETHER YOU WIN OR LOSE

It's how much the networks pay when you play the game -- and the ACC is running up the score.

Time came to decide if the Atlantic Coast Conference should add Florida State to its roster, and there stood Gene Corrigan, saying dollars shouldn't drive the biggest expansion in the league's history. "Don't vote if you think it will bring in money," he told the eight professors who are the ACC's voting members, "because I'm not sure that it will bring in a dime."

Sure, and Hugh McColl and Ed Crutchfield bought all those Florida banks because they're partial to fresh-squeezed orange juice. We're talking a franchise in the nation's fourth-most-populous state, one with five of the nation's 60-largest media markets, one that just happens to be rabid about big-time college football.

Money, money, money: It makes the world go round. Just ask the 23,000 people who paid $105 for tickets (and, for most, thousands more in donations for a chance to buy them) to the ACC basketball tournament this month. Or Nationwide Insurance, Norwegian Cruise Line, NCNB and other companies paying $15,000 to $20,000 for 30-second TV spots during the games. Or the athletic directors salivating at the $1 billion CBS will pay for rights to the next seven National Collegiate Athletic Association tournaments.

But money can corrupt, as anyone who follows intercollegiate athletics knows only too well. So when explaining why the ACC is expanding, it's no surprise that Corrigan, the conference's commissioner since 1987, lists other reasons: The Seminoles support ACC efforts to reform college athletics. Florida State is a great academic institution. Florida is home to a disproportionate number of fine athletes, most of whom haven't been considering ACC schools.

"The dollars in college athletics are just so big, and they have been uncontrolled for so long," notes Jeff Orleans, a former University of North Carolina administrator who is commissioner of the Ivy League, "... it's very hard to be the first conference to say, 'We're going to get off the gravy train.'"

And that train has picked up steam in the four years Corrigan, 63, has been in the conference's cab. In addition to turning the eight-school conference into nine for the '90s, he has cut deals that will make it millions more: four-year contracts with Florida's Citrus Bowl and with cable-TV's ESPN network for the ACC-Big East Challenge, which instantly became the most-important event in early-season college basketball.

"As a result of the addition of Florida State, our conference ... has to be the strongest in all sports in the United States," Georgia Tech Athletic Director Homer Rice says. "Through Gene's leadership, we've been able to reach that plateau."

Riches and reform aren't contradictory goals, conference insiders say: The first provides the power necessary to push the latter. "If you want to be at the forefront of shaping intercollegiate athletics, you've got to have a power base," says Bill Brill, executive sports editor of the Roanoke (Va.) Times & World-News. "And without Florida, you can argue that the ACC's power base was restricted."

"Gene is one of the two or three outstanding leaders in intercollegiate athletics," says UNC Athletic Director John Swofford, who got his first sports-administration job from Corrigan. "He's provided superb leadership, not only for our conference but nationally."

Corrigan is, the people who run the ACC claim, the right man at the right place at the right time. He grew up in the league, playing lacrosse at Duke and cutting his teeth as a sports administrator at the...