ACC approves westward expansion, adding Stanford, Cal and SMU to become 18-team league
ACC presidents and chancellors voted Friday morning to approve a monumental shift in conference membership, green-lighting an expansion plan that adds Stanford, California and Southern Methodist.
The ACC’s 15 presidents voted on the proposal, which had been discussed for weeks, to extend invitations to the three schools — all of which are beyond the league’s existing footprint in the Eastern Time Zone. The league needed 12 of its 15 current members to vote in favor of the deal.
Later Friday morning, all three schools formally accepted the invitation. They will begin playing in the ACC in the 2024-25 school year with SMU joining July 1, 2024, and Stanford and Cal coming on board Aug. 2, 2024.
Clemson, Florida State, North Carolina and N.C. State had previously been against the move. Thursday night, leaders from UNC’s Board of Trustees issued a statement strongly opposing such a move. Presidents from UNC, Florida State and Clemson all voted against expansion Friday morning.
Still, ACC commissioner Jim Phillips wrangled the 12 votes needed to help the ACC keep pace with other conferences, like the Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC, who have pushed their membership to 16 or 18 teams.
“I’m not sure any of us would have predicted this two years ago,” Phillips said Friday, “but you either get busy or you get left behind. So I appreciate the work that the ACC Board of Directors did in helping us announce three new additions.”
New revenue
The new teams are expected to bring in $600 million in new media rights revenue to the ACC from its contract with ESPN over the next 12 years. That’s an average of $50 million per school year to be divided among the member schools.
All ACC members, including the three new schools, have signed a grant-of-rights agreement that forfeits its media revenues to the league office to be distributed back to the schools. That agreement runs through 2036 and has been seen as a double-edged sword that simultaneously keeps the league together while also keeping it from improving its TV deals.
Phillips said Friday’s moves did nothing to weaken the grant of rights.
“No, no,” Phillips said. “Only that we have three more schools that have signed the same grant of rights as our existing schools.”
California officials, in a news release, said the school won’t retain its full share of league media revenues until its 10th year in the ACC. The school said it was surrendering portions of its media revenue annually “to support and strengthen the conference and its current member institutions.”
“We are very pleased with the outcome, which will support the best interests of our student-athletes and aligns with Berkeley’s values,” California-Berkeley chancellor Carol Christ said in a statement. “We are confident that the ACC and its constituent institutions are an excellent match for our university and will provide an elite competitive context for our student-athletes in this changing landscape of intercollegiate athletics.”
Stanford and SMU did not disclose their financial terms, although neither are receving full media revenue shares initially.
All three schools will immediately get full revenue shares from other sources, such as the ACC Network, the College Football Playoff, bowl games and NCAA men’s basketball tournament.
Stanford and SMU leaders joined Cal in saying they are glad to be joining the ACC.
“We are extremely fortunate to have found such an exciting new conference home in the ACC,” outgoing Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne said in a statement. “We believe this move will offer excellent opportunities for our student-athletes, and we will continue our commitment to supporting them in their pursuit of both academic and athletic success.”
During the discussions over the past month, Stanford and Cal had publicly agreed to receive only a partial share of those payments initially, while SMU pledged to initially go without any conference media revenue for several years.
“This is a transformational day for SMU,” SMU president Gerald Turner said in a statement. “Becoming a member of the ACC will positively impact all aspects of the collegiate experience on the Hilltop and will raise SMU’s profile on a national level. We want to thank everyone who has helped position SMU for this important moment. Joining the ACC is an historic milestone in our institution’s history, and the start of a new chapter in SMU Athletics.”
The process of lining up the 12 votes needed for passage led to negotiations that changed the financial framework over the last three weeks, Phillips said.
A portion of the new income produced by the expansion will go into the ACC’s new success initiatives program that rewards schools for on-field success. That’s meant to quell concerns, expressed the loudest by Florida State and Clemson, about the growing annual revenue gap between the league and the SEC and Big Ten schools.
“There’s something for everybody in this and that’s difficult to do,” Phillips said. “But in the end, it drives greater revenue to our schools. It gets us into amazing markets. It allows us to brand with three tremendous institutions, get into two new time zones.”
The ACC moves into two of the nation’s top-10 television markets by adding the three new schools.
SMU is in the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, media market, the No. 5 market in the United States with 3.04 million television homes, trailing only New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia, according to Nielson.
The San Francisco Bay Area, home to Stanford and Cal-Berkeley, is the nation’s No. 10 television market with 2.59 million television homes.
Conference scramble
Stanford and Cal became interested in joining the ACC after the Pac-12 disintegrated in a dizzying array of conference-shifting moves in late July and early August.
After Colorado announced its intention to leave the Pac-12 for the Big 12 on July 27, Arizona, Arizona State and Utah followed suit on Aug. 4 with Washington and Oregon announcing plans to join the Big Ten that same day.
With Southern California and UCLA having announced plans to leave the Pac-12 for the Big Ten on July 1, 2022, the latest moves left Stanford, Cal, Washington State and Oregon State as the only four teams remaining in the conference.
SMU, a longtime Southwest Conference member until that league disbanded in 1996, competed in the Western Athletic Conference (1996-2005) and Conference USA (2005-13) before spending the past 10 years in the American Athletic Conference.
SMU actually planned to join the Big East in 2013 before that league’s football-playing members broke away to form the American Athletic Conference.
Managing cross-country travel
With his far-flung league now stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific coasts, Phillips addressed student-athlete welfare and travel concerns.
“I would say to you one of the biggest hurdles, if not the biggest hurdle, that gave us great pause was about the student athlete experience,” Phillips said. “What does that feel like? What does that look like? California and the Bay Area, that’s a long way away from our membership.”
In football, teams will travel west to play Bay Area teams in every other season. The California schools will come east three or four times per season. Phillips said the hope is to have Stanford make one or two of those trips in early September, since it offers classes on the quarter schedule so it doesn’t start back to school until late September.
In basketball, existing league teams will travel to the Bay Area in two of every four seasons. The plan is for teams to play Cal and Stanford on the same trip, perhaps in a Thursday-Saturday or Saturday-Monday scenario. When Cal and Stanford travel east, they would play two teams on a single trip, such as Duke and UNC, Virginia and Virginia Tech or even Miami and Florida State.
In sports such as track and field, golf and cross country, teams already travel to play invitationals or jamborees on a weekend with schools from several conferences, so they won’t be impacted by the new ACC additions at all, Phillips said.
Baseball and softball teams play three-game weekend series in the spring, and that will continue.
ACC expansion history
Adding Stanford, Cal and SMU marks the first change in the ACC’s membership since July 1, 2014, when Louisville joined just as charter member Maryland officially left for the Big Ten.
Those moves completed a busy decade of expansion during which the ACC added Virginia Tech and Miami in 2004, Boston College in 2005, Pitt, Syracuse and Notre Dame (in all sports but football and hockey) in 2013.
The ACC began as a seven-team league on May 8, 1953, when Duke, North Carolina, N.C. State, Wake Forest, Clemson, South Carolina and Maryland left the Southern Conference to form the new conference. Virginia became the ACC’s eighth member on Dec. 14, 1953.
South Carolina left in 1971 with Georgia Tech joining in 1979 to restore the eight-team alignment.
Florida State joined the ACC in 1991 in all sports but football, with that sport joining the league in 1992.
This story was originally published September 1, 2023 at 8:42 AM.