Point/Counterpoint: A Dialogue on the ACC's Expansion

The dust has settled on the Pac-12. As everyone knows by now, the ACC has welcomed Cal and Stanford, previously from the Pac-12, and SMU, formerly of the AAC, into the fold. Last week, Matt Newton gave us the breakdown, and what it means for the 15 “existing schools” of the ACC.

But today, we take the conversation a little further in a new feature we call Point/Counterpoint. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Val: Matt, you did a fine job breaking down the latest round of conference realignment when the ACC absorbed Cal, Stanford and SMU last week.

It seems pretty clear to me, Matt, that the ACC had no choice but to expand. There have been some major programs changing conference affiliations -- Texas and Oklahoma, UCLA and USC -- and in the process, the Big 12 looked left for dead, but it recovered and probably moved ahead of the ACC in terms of prestige, while the Pac-12 did in fact die.

The ACC couldn't afford to stand pat. Standing pat is what broke the Pac-12. What do you think of adding Cal, Stanford and SMU, Matt?

Matt: I agree that the ACC simply couldn't sit idly by while a "Big Three" replaced the Power Five. Short of finally convincing Notre Dame to become a full member of the ACC (which might not be possible), these were three of the best available programs that hadn't already been picked up.

Val: No way was that going to happen. Realignment is all about football and Notre Dame is the biggest brand in football.

Matt: True. But these three new schools fit the academic profile of the conference and also offer a lot from an Olympic sports perspective.

From a football standpoint, this "expansion" leaves a lot to be desired. None of these three programs have accomplished anything of note recently and serve to produce only a marginal increase in TV viewership. With that said, the ACC got these three schools at a massive discount and the immediate impact on financial distribution - an estimated $50-60 million according to ESPN - is a solid step in the right direction.

The question now is will it be enough? That some of that additional revenue will be directed towards a pool to reward program success is a direct attempt at a concession for some of the loudest complainers in the ACC (i.e. Florida State) who wanted a change in the conference's revenue distribution structure. But the revenue gap between the SEC/Big Ten/(and now Big 12) and the ACC is still a wide one and this expansion does little to close it. I'm not sure this move will do much to convince those schools to stay in the long term, especially those three that voted no to the expansion - Florida State, Clemson, and North Carolina. And if those three programs find a way out of the ACC (and its restrictive grant of rights agreement), can the ACC still survive in its current form?

Val: Well, Paul Finebaum, a talking head at ESPN, has basically come out and said that adding Cal, Stanford and SMU has driven a wedge in between the three schools who voted against their inclusion and has now paved the way for the trio of schools to leave. I’m not sure this is the case. FSU has already been so vocal about wanting to leave the ACC, or else get way more money than anyone else in the conference, that it’s coming up in Board of Visitors meetings. But the simple fact is that there will be more money to distribute to ACC schools in 2024 than there will be in 2023. How is this a bad thing?

Furthermore, given their recalcitrance, I have to figure that if either of UNC, FSU or Clemson could get out of the grant of rights, they would have done so by now. I saw one estimate that were FSU to leave now, they would have to pay close to half a billion dollars over the next 13 years. They’re not going anywhere, anytime soon.

So, what it means is that we’ve got a gargantuan conference, one spreading from coast to coast. All Coast Conference anyone? Which means we have the same footprint as the B1G 10. Without the ludicrously out-of-date conference name.

Much has been made this growth doesn’t move the football needle, and it’s football dollars that everyone seems to be chasing. But I think that everyone who raises this critique is forgetting that we’ve added SMU. They are the sleeping giant in the football landscape. For a while they were the best program in Texas and they have loads of alumni dollars to splash on rebuilding a program that is finally back in a Power 4 conference. There’s no reason to think that they won’t be the king of NIL money, since they have experience throwing money at athletes back in the dark days. You know, back when it was illegal. The B1G Ten was desperate to get into Texas, and you gotta figure that they know something about football. Well, now the ACC is there, too.

Matt: Val, you make a great point about people somewhat forgetting about the potential value SMU adds. Sure, Cal and Stanford are from the old Power Five, giving them a largely superficial standing from a football aspect. And the Mustangs are hardly considered among the football elite in Texas. But that could be changing. Joining the ACC marks the culmination of a nearly four-decade journey for SMU coming back from receiving the "Death Penalty" for recruiting violations in the late 80s. SMU is currently undergoing a $100 million dollar expansion to its Gerald J. Ford Stadium, one part of a roughly $300 million project to improve/upgrade all of its athletic facilities. SMU has also leaned heavily into NIL, with its Boulevard Collective reportedly paying all football and men's basketball athletes somewhere in the neighborhood of $35,000 a year.

That's why the Mustangs could afford to join the ACC without receiving any cut of the conference's television revenue for the first nine years, a crucial reason why the ACC chose to pull the trigger on grabbing SMU. With these investments, there's plenty of reason to believe SMU might be a "program on the rise." There's still a ways to go, in particular with re-energizing the Dallas area to care about SMU football and SMU athletics. But there is an argument to be made that SMU provides the biggest "boom" potential among the three new member schools, especially if SMU is able to recover its status as a major football brand in the state of Texas over the course of the next decade. Cornering a potentially resurgent Dallas-Fort Worth college football market could be the key to the ACC catching up with the other three super-conferences.

Val: For me, personally, I like this move because I’m not a fan of football, especially college football. And in the desire for college football to fully become a minor league for the NFL, they’re undermining the very distinctive element – bowl games – that made collegiate football so interesting. I like this move more for what it brings to the table for the Olympic sports.

Matt: Anytime Olympic sports are brought up, it's mostly considered to be an extraneous factor - a terrible reality that proves that the powers making these decisions have lost sight of the essence of collegiate athletics. But I fully agree that this expansion creates some great new opportunities from an Olympic sports standpoint. Assuming things can be kept to a reasonable level in terms of travel - which I believe is manageable - this move essentially makes the ACC the unquestioned dominant power in the all-sports college athletics landscape. There's an argument to be made that the ACC was already the best in this regard. In 2022-2023, ACC schools brought home nine NCAA team championships (most ever) and 29 individual national titles and six ACC schools ranked in the top 20 of the final LEARFIELD Directors Cup Division I standings, headlined by Virginia at No. 4.

Of course, winning the LEARFIELD Directors Cup for the 26th time in its 29 years of existence was Stanford. Adding Stanford to the ranks of the ACC will essentially guarantee that the conference is in contention for the national title in almost every sport, with many sports likely to feature two or three ACC schools as the top contenders for the championship year in and year out. I'm particularly excited for a new rivalry to emerge between Virginia and Stanford in a variety of Olympic sports that both schools have excelled at - men's and women's soccer, men's and women's swim & dive, men's and women's golf, men's and women's tennis, baseball, and rowing, just to name a few. UVA and Stanford are routinely in the top 10 in all of these sports and now they will compete with each other for both the ACC and the national championships in all of them. That's really exciting.

Val: Yes it is. Stanford women’s soccer in the ACC? Dreams are made of that. The most exciting team I’ve seen in college the past decade was Stanford’s Sophia Smith – Catarina Macario – Madison Haley three-headed hydra a couple of years back. And in women’s hoops we’re only welcoming the all time wins leader in Tara VanDerveer.

Look, I want the ACC to survive. I was a fan of the ACC long before I ever thought about walking The Lawn. Again, since we’re all talking about football, the Big 12 had surged ahead of the ACC and that was when everyone was considering Clemson to be a power.

Matt: Clemson's status as a college football power is definitely in jeopardy, having been blown out of their past two games, losing four of their past seven, and with three of those losses coming by three scores or more.

Val: Schadenfreude alert! Clemson was scary bad this past weekend. Hard to believe I was a Duke fan for a day. But I will be very happy every time Florida State, UNC or Clemson lose. I see expansion as a move that the ACC had to make, kind of how we used to think a shark always had to keep swimming.

Here’s the thing, conferences have been in constant flux. Anyone remember the SWC? The landscape is going to change over the next 10 years. I’m betting the ACC did the best possible job to retain the flexibility to be able to be capitalize on the next realignment wave.

Matt: And that’s a wrap! If anyone has any burning questions you’d like to see covered in the future, hit us up on social media using the links below.

Subscribe to the Cavaliers Now Newsletter to receive UVA sports news in your inbox first thing on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

See more Virginia football news and content: Virginia Football on Sports Illustrated

See more Virginia sports news and content: Virginia Cavaliers on Sports Illustrated

To stay up to date on all Virginia Cavaliers sports news, follow CavaliersNow on social media:

Facebook: @CavaliersNow
Twitter: @CavaliersNowFN