Another ESPN Report Suggests the ACC Is an Option for Cal and Pac-12
Sports news sites continue to churn out conjecture about possible conference realignment and the options available to the Pac-12 in general and Cal in particular.
But unless you are intimately involved in investigating or reporting on conference realignment, a lot of the complicated explanations of the options are merely white noise.
The Pac-12 could blah, blah, blah, or merge with blah, blah, blah, because the TV networks blah, blah, blah, and Cal could blah, blah, blah, since the San Francisco Bay Area market is blah, blah, blah but doesn’t blah, blah, blah.
A long ESPN.com piece posted today (Monday) is another one of these conjecture stories that tries to shed light on the issue, but ends up with a lot of blah, blah, blahs in the reader’s mind, especially for Cal fans wondering where the Golden Bears will end up.
The only recourse is to pick out a paragraph or two from each story that seems to apply to the school in which you are interested. For us it’s Cal.
The main thrust of the ESPN story is that Washington and Oregon want out of the Pac-12 in the worst way, but there is one section of that ESPN report that applies to Cal, and here is that excerpt:
The Pac-12 schools in prime markets are the obvious ACC target, as it's unlikely any TV entity is going to come in and bid high on the league now that they are vulnerable and lack the Los Angeles market. (Adding San Diego State and Boise State, which both seem like obvious choices, still doesn't move the financial needle.)
Whatever financial estimates the Pac-12 schools get amid their current open negotiating window will inevitably underwhelm. Does that allow the ACC to make a targeted strike to take the best available from the Pac-12 -- Oregon, Washington, Stanford and California [we added the bold] -- and then take either two or four others? Those could be either two or all of these – Arizona State, Colorado, TCU, Cincinnati -- to form a Western wing of the league.
The question would loom large whether this wing would want a 14-year commitment, similar to the current schools.
If the Pac-12 schools are tempted, it would seemingly bring a bigger annual payout to the San Francisco Bay Area and Pacific Northwest schools while trimming the fat that USC and UCLA wanted to escape. If those programs could come pro rata with the ACC, perhaps the extra ACC Network money from adding a flurry of big markets could create a pool of revenue that is distributed to the league's top performers. More revenue that's distributed unequally is the key for the ACC making sure the grant of rights doesn't drive the league apart.
Ok, what it is saying is that the ACC might consider adding Cal, Stanford, Washington and Oregon and perhaps one or two other schools to form a 20-team conference that would include a western wing of schools. This is not new. We have heard this idea before. But the more often it is repeated in conjecture reports about conference realignment the greater the credibility of that possibility.
Immediately after USC and UCLA announced they were leaving the Pac-12 in 2024, the thought of Cal joining the ACC seemed silly. Now it’s within the realm of possibility.
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Cover photo by Kelley L. Cox, USA TODAY Sports
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