ACC’s desperate California dreaming would be a perpetual nightmare
It doesn’t look like the ACC’s tire-kicking with California and Stanford, newly marooned in the wreckage of the Pac-4, is going to go anywhere. Thankfully.
It’s fine for the ACC to do its due diligence with two like-minded institutions, but going bicoastal would be a massive mistake, something the Big Ten is going to find out all too quickly. This California dreaming would become a prolonged nightmare.
The reality is the two schools don’t bring anything the ACC doesn’t have now, short of a West Coast television presence that wasn’t nearly enough to get the pre-implosion Pac-12 a decent television deal once USC and UCLA jumped to the Big Ten.
But as the Big Ten and Big 12 pick over the wreckage of the Pac-12, and the SEC sits smugly on its throne having already grabbed the two biggest prizes available two years ago to start off this latest round of rich-stealing-from-poor, the ACC really has to look at any and every option that could potentially make it stronger. Taking a long look at Cal and Stanford is the smart move. So is passing.
Because the economics seem pretty obvious – any new addition to the ACC is going to have to bring more money in than the current schools do, or everyone will just get a smaller piece of the bigger pie – this feels like either a token gesture out of pity or a Hail Mary galaxy-brain play to entice Notre Dame fully into the ACC fold by adding one of the Irish’s traditional football rivals.
If anything pushes South Bend closer to the Atlantic Coast, it’ll be a shift in the plate tectonics of Notre Dame’s NBC deal, the continental bedrock upon which the Irish has built its football independence. As the Pac-12 just found out, this is a terrible time to take television rights to market, with Fox tapped out and Disney looking for a “strategic partner” for ESPN, and there are only two ND football seasons left to run with NBC.
If NBC doesn’t increase Notre Dame’s take-home pay, given the state of the industry, and puts more games on USA or (gasp) streaming on Peacock – don’t forget, NBC just bought a big Saturday night package from the Big Ten that’s going to take precedence over the Irish – would open access to ABC and ESPN suddenly become more attractive to Notre Dame? And what would it mean for Notre Dame if Comcast/NBC Universal ends up buying half of ESPN from Disney?
And any dalliance with the two California schools presumes that adding them wouldn’t open any of the ACC’s exit doors even a crack for Florida State to go charging through (and down a road to nowhere, but that’s a dog with different fleas).
There was a Pac-12 play for the ACC, one that started bubbling up a few weeks ago on the final day the conference gathered in Charlotte for its annual football kickoff. As a 50-50 partner with ESPN in the ACC Network, anything that grows revenue for ESPN benefits the ACC as well. Was there a way, before the Pac-12’s collapse, to bring that conference under the ACC Network umbrella?
That could have taken the form of the ACC actually bidding for the Pac-12’s TV rights as part of a package with ESPN to add late-night content to the ACC Network – can you imagine Phillips and ESPN’s Jimmy Pitaro sitting down to make the Pac-12 football schedule next fall? – or a cooperative television-rights agreement with the Pac-12: Two competitive conferences, one rights package. The relative strengths and weaknesses of the ACC and the Pac-12 might have had a little yin and yang to them on the open market.
Alas, the Pac-12 collapsed so quickly, starting with Colorado in a move to the Big 12 that had been seen as inevitable for months. That was followed by the unveiling of the long-awaited rights proposal from Apple that had no cable or broadcast component to it, fomenting panic among the buffoons that run universities these days
The opposite of a gold rush ensued – go east, young men and women – as everyone with a parachute jumped out of the plane, consequences be damned: Oregon and Washington joined USC and UCLA in the Big Ten, Arizona and Arizona State and Utah followed Colorado to the Big 12.
All of which left Cal, Oregon State, Stanford and Washington State holding the bag. An empty bag, as it turns out. The Pac-4’s best option going forward is probably some sort of a coming-together with the Mountain West, a conference whose core teams have so far mostly stuck together – and, on occasion, produced better football results than the Pac-Whatever in recent years. Not to mention Florida State.
Four months ago, San Diego State was all but begging to join the Pac-12. Surprise!
Either way, the ACC’s hands are best kept clean on this one. Many ACC insiders scoffed at the Big Ten’s poaching of USC and UCLA because it’s unequivocally terrible for the athletes these schools, presidents and athletic directors are supposed to support. They were right then, and they’d be wrong now if they changed course, especially for a pair of leftovers.
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This story was originally published August 8, 2023 at 12:23 PM with the headline "ACC’s desperate California dreaming would be a perpetual nightmare."
