Monday, September 4, 2023

ACC Reversal: Stanford, Cal, and SMU Are In

The addition of Stanford, California (Berkeley), and Southern Methodist University to the Atlantic Coast Conference, which looked to be in critical condition two weeks ago, is now a reality. ACC rules require a three-fourths majority vote of member institutions to admit new schools. Previously, 11 of the 15 (73%) schools were reported to have been supporting the additions, with the opposition coming from Florida State, Clemson, North Carolina, and North Carolina State. NC State was reported as the school that flipped to OK the move.

The expansion makes sense in the academic domain, as Stanford, Cal, Duke, Georgia Tech, Miami, North Carolina, Notre Dame, Pittsburgh, and Virginia are members of the prestigious Association of American Universities. The AAU is an "honor society" for universities, if you will, based on faculty members' receipt of federal research grants and other markers of academic eminence. However, as shown in the following map, Stanford and Cal are an enormous distance away from the existing ACC schools, SMU somewhat less so.


Both the three new schools and many of the 15 pre-existing ACC members had incentives to support the merger:
  • Stanford and Cal were without a major conference connection after the Pacific 12 imploded (four members each going to the Big Ten and Big 12), so, as several sports commentators suggested, the ACC gave the two northern California schools a respectable landing spot. So seemingly desperate were Stanford and Cal to get into the ACC that they agreed to accept only 30% of what the other schools receive from the conference's football television deal with ESPN for their first few years in the league.
  • Stanford has a huge athletic department, fielding teams in 36 sports (20 women's, 16 men's). Further, the Cardinal athletic department has won the Learfield Director's Cup -- in which schools' sports teams are awarded points for capturing national championships, taking second, advancing to various rounds of postseason tournaments, etc. -- in 26 of the award's 29 years. To fund such a large athletic department, with top-notch coaches and facilities, naturally requires a lot of money, a good chunk of which comes from football television revenue. 
  • For SMU, the move finally puts the Mustangs in a major conference for the first time since the days of the old Southwest Conference. To gain entrance, SMU is making an even bigger financial sacrifice than Stanford and Cal, agreeing not to receive any money from the ACC television package for several years.
  • For the 15 pre-existing ACC members, there are two provision in the conference's television deal with ESPN (good through 2036) that are of interest. 
    • First, if the conference drops below 15 schools, that could adversely affect the conference's television deal. With Florida State and Clemson making noises about leaving the ACC -- although there seem to be financially prohibitive barriers to them actually doing so before 2036 -- adding schools thus gives the ACC strength in numbers.
    • Second, adding schools increases the ACC's television revenue* and with the three new schools initially taking less than full shares, that means more money is available for the other 15 schools. According to an August 2 ESPN.com article, "The ACC recently changed its revenue distribution model to reward success on the field in football and basketball. But Florida State has also pushed for changing the model to reward programs that generate higher television revenue and marketability, areas where FSU believes it has an advantage." Hence, some extra revenue could be directed disproportionately to Florida State and Clemson, although one article calls such potential enticement to the Seminoles and Tigers "too little, too late."

As for the long distances between some members of the new 18-team ACC, one idea that has been floated to minimize the extent of travel is to have multiteam gatherings in Dallas, a location midway across the country and home to SMU. Hypothetically, teams from Cal, Stanford, Syracuse, and Boston College in a given sport (e.g., baseball or women's tennis)  could all visit Dallas over a weekend and each play three games or matches (Cal vs. Syracuse, Cal vs. BC, Cal vs. SMU, Stanford vs. Syracuse, Stanford vs. BC, Stanford vs. SMU). Several of these athletic festivals, each featuring Stanford, Cal, and different schools from the ACC's eastern base, could take place during the year. 

The University Athletic Association, a Division III conference of academically elite private schools, uses such a neutral-site, festival approach and could thus serve as a model for the ACC. Below is a screenshot showing how Emory's women's volleyball squad is scheduled to play conference matches against Chicago, Rochester, and Carnegie Mellon, all hosted at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.


There you have it. How the ACC moves forward, dealing with logistics, television deals, disgruntled member schools, and probably other challenges, will certainly be interesting to watch!

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*According to Yahoo! Sports, "The ACC’s television contract with ESPN includes a pro-rata clause requiring the network to increase the value of the deal by one Tier 1 share for every new member — believed to be about $24 million a share, or about 70% of a full ACC share, which includes Tiers 1-3.In other words, when a new school joins the ACC, ESPN pays the conference an additional amount per school, so the pie gets bigger rather than all the schools having to take smaller slices of a static pie. The "pro-rata" language appears to refer to how, with approximately 30% of the 2016-2036 ACC/ESPN contract length having elapsed as of 2023, any new members as of this time would receive at most only 70% of what a full 20-year payout would have amounted to. And we know that Stanford, Cal, and SMU are each taking far less than the amount potentially available to them. Tier 1/2/3 rights are explained here.