Stanford, Cal see move to ACC as 'reality we're faced with'
The news out of the ACC on Friday morning that the league is bringing in Stanford, Californiaand SMUmarks another paradigm shift for the Atlantic Coast Conference and for the rapidly changing landscape of college sports.
The ACC now stretches to the Pacific Ocean and into the heart of Texas, as the league expands to 18 athletic departments and 17 football programs.
Stanford athletic director Bernard Muir said the news came to him at 2 a.m. in his hotel room in Hawai'i, where the Cardinal are playing Friday night. Cal chancellor Carol Christ said she got a "loud knocking" on her hotel room door in San Diego, where she's visiting donors, at 5 a.m.
The early-morning disruptions for news that solidifies Cal's and Stanford's short-term future -- and gives SMU a seat at a bigger table -- is another seismic step in a radically evolving collegiate landscape.
"It's important to put [this] in the context of what's happening in college athletics generally," Christ said Friday morning. "This is an incredibly turbulent landscape right now. Conference realignment is just one of the signs of real change in how interested fans and the public are in consuming athletics."
She added: "I don't think that we're at the end of the road now. I think we're going to see extraordinary changes in intercollegiate athletics."
Muir also sees the move to a league based on the opposite coast as a sign of the times in college athletics.
"If you asked me a few years ago if we're going to be playing in conferences that are coast-to-coast, I'd have said probably not," Muir told ESPN in a phone interview. "This is the reality that we're faced with. We've got to make this work."
To make it work is going to take significant concessions. Sources told ESPN the financial package forStanford and Cal to join the ACC will include taking just 30% of a full league share for the next seven years. That number will jump to 70% in Year 8 and 75% in Year 9 before the schools receive full shares in the 10th year and beyond, per sources. SMU will not take any television revenue for the first nine years, per sources.
All of the teams agreed to a grant of rights through 2036, which is consistent with what the existing 15 ACC members have agreed to. Leadership at Cal cautioned that conference realignment isn't over and said they are pleased to have a spot in an established league for the next decade-plus.
"A month ago I didn't have any gray hair," Cal athletic director Jim Knowlton joked. "There's a little bit of relief."
He added: "It's a great fit for us. The schools are a perfect fit for who we are."
Leadership at Cal and Stanford acknowledged there are budgetary and travel issues that come with the move. Muir said there's "virtually no change" for Stanford in how 22 of the athletic department's 36 sports will travel and compete. He said the other 14 are going to figure it out.
He said a priority will be overall student-athlete well-being, mental health and support.
"We'll really be diving deep with various members of Stanford's academic community," Muir said. "How do we make this happen? We're going to be really excited about trying to figure this out. It's a heck of an opportunity for us.
"Our faculty and administration are going to come together with us to create the road map. We know this can be done."
Christ said 19 of Cal's 30 athletic programs are going to be impacted "minimally or not at all" by the league shift. She added that she's "not terribly worried" about football travel, as those games are played mostly on weekends, pointing out that Cal opens this season Saturday at North Texas on the outskirts of Dallas.
Both Muir and Christ mentioned using Dallas, where SMU is located, as a midway point for teams from some of the more heavily impacted sports to gather and play.
"The ACC is really interested in using Dallas as a place where teams may come together to minimize the travel," Christ said.
As for budgets, Stanford has an endowment of more than $36 billion, so any issues must be considered in that context. Muir called the financial position of the athletic department "tough" for the next seven years but said he felt the move was necessary to uphold what his student-athletes asked for -- a platform to compete for conference and national championships.
Cal's finances are a bit tricky. Christ acknowledged significant facility debt in the athletic department but pushed back against the notion that Cal's situation was atypical among large departments.
"There are certainly financial challenges to this agreement," she said, acknowledging that Cal's annual media revenue will be cut by well over 50% from the previous agreement. "We believe this was the best agreement in financial terms that we could have made. We look forward to working through the various challenges."
