ACC's Efforts to Add Cal and Stanford Expectedly Break Down

The bizarre proposal to create a bicoastal Atlantic Coast Conference by adding Cal and Stanford has unsurprisingly failed to get serious traction among those with the authority to make such a drastic measure actually happen.

According to a report from ESPN's Pete Thamel and Andrea Adelson, the presidents of the ACC schools met on Wednesday night to discuss the addition of Cal and Stanford and, inevitably, those efforts "hit significant roadblocks." Ultimately, the lack of "significant value" being brought back to the conference in the transaction proved to be the critical and obvious obstacle. The same goes for SMU, which had been thrown into the conversation as a possible acquisition for the ACC as well.

SMU had also been bandied about along with Cal/Stanford, and those conversations aren’t headed anywhere either, per ESPN sources.
— Pete Thamel (@PeteThamel) August 10, 2023

These scrambling efforts of the ACC to find a way to generate additional revenue was prompted by the latest chapter in the conference realignment saga, with the Big Ten and the Big 12 each making moves to acquire schools from the Pac-12 in the last week. 2023 is set to be the final year of the Pac-12 in its current form, with only four of its 12 current member schools set to remain in 2024.

USC and UCLA made the move to join the Big Ten in 2022, a response by the Big Ten to keep up after the SEC acquired Texas and Oklahoma the year before. Another year later, the Pac-12 was hit again, with the Big 12 taking Colorado, Arizona, Arizona State, and Utah and the Big Ten grabbing Washington and Oregon. With all of these moves set to take effect at the beginning of the 2024-2025 academic year, that leaves just four schools expected to be in the Conference of Champions in 2024: Oregon State, Washington State, California, and Stanford.

With the SEC and the Big Ten furthering the financial gap between themselves and the rest of the conferences and the Big 12 making considerable moves to posture itself on the next rung of the "Power Five", the ball is in the court of the ACC to respond or get left behind. There have been several efforts made by certain ACC schools over the last couple of years to explore a potential exit from the conference, seeking to join either the Big Ten or the SEC and escape the "sinking ship" of the ACC. The latest of which was a vigorous and very public charge from Florida State president Richard McCullough that the school would "very seriously" consider leaving the conference unless the ACC changed its revenue distribution model, which currently gives each of the member schools an equal share of the conference's television revenue.

Of course, the reason these latest conference realignment movements haven't involved any ACC schools is because those schools are bound together by a grant of rights agreement that yields control over the conference's media rights to the ACC through 2036. There is a deadline of August 15th for any ACC school to give notice if it plans to leave the conference next year, but it doesn't seem likely that any school will give such notice, including the loudly-complaining Seminoles.

With ACC schools seemingly unable to leave the conference, the only other option is for the conference to explore other means of bridging the revenue gap between the ACC and the SEC and Big Ten. Since a move to acquire Cal, Stanford, and SMU would do little to move the needle on the revenue front, while simultaneously presenting numerous logistical challenges for the other non-football sports teams, it makes sense that those efforts didn't gain much traction.

It's unclear where the ACC goes from here and if you ask Virginia football head coach Tony Elliott about it, he'll tell you it hasn't even crossed his mind.

"Man, I haven't given that an inkling of thought to be honest with you," Elliott said this week when asked about the ACC's place in conference realignment. "I'm focusing on I know who we've got right out the gate. I know we play another team in the Big Ten already and we've got a heck of an ACC schedule. I'm really not worried about that. I've got complete confidence in Dr. Williams and President Ryan to navigate that."

With all of these talks yielding no real movement related to the ACC, maybe it's best we follow Tony Elliott's example and leave it well alone until something actually happens. Football season draws near.

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