College football conference realignment live updates: ACC adding Stanford, Cal, SMU

With Stanford, California and SMU landing invites to the ACC on Friday, college sports’ conference realignment revolving door of the past three years has finally closed. (We think.) In the end, 17 schools either moved up to a Power 5 conference or flipped from one Power 5 league to another.

But two, Oregon State and Washington State, have been kicked out of the club.

ACC commissioner Jim Phillips would have preferred unanimity. Of course he wanted that.

But he didn’t get it, because three university presidents and chancellors voted against expansion and specifically against adding Stanford, Cal and SMU as members. They were outvoted, 12-3, and the new schools were officially added and announced by lunchtime Friday.

But those three dissenters — Clemson, Florida State and North Carolina — have created a fascinating dynamic for this conference moving forward.

Cal chancellor Carol Christ was awoken at 5 a.m. Pacific Time with a loud knock on her hotel room door in San Diego. She opened the door, where a hotel employee informed her she had an urgent phone call.

“It turned out to be very good news,” she said Friday.

After a tumultuous month of conference realignment, Cal and Stanford will remain in a “power” conference, joining the ACC. SMU is also coming aboard as the league expands to 17 full members, plus Notre Dame in non-football sports. Yet another conference will span coast to coast. The future of Cal and Stanford involves more trips east, less television revenue than most of their new conference peers and perhaps splitting the travel distance with conference gatherings in Dallas.

Read more from Chris Vannini and Stewart Mandel on what the move means for both programs.

“I respect the outcome of today’s vote and welcome our new members to the ACC," Guskiewicz said Friday.

“My vote against expansion was informed from feedback I have gathered over the last several weeks from our athletic leadership, coaches, faculty athletic advisors, student-athletes and a variety of other stakeholders who care deeply about our University and the success of our outstanding athletic program. I look forward to working with all our colleagues in the ACC to ensure excellence in academics and athletics — something our conference has long been known for.”

"We appreciate the efforts of Commissioner Phillips and our conference partners. There are many complicated factors that led us to vote no," FSU president Richard McCullough said in a statement Friday. "That said, we welcome these truly outstanding institutions and look forward to working with them as our new partners in the Atlantic Coast Conference."

"All three schools are outstanding academic and athletic institutions, and our vote against expansion does not reflect on their quality," FSU athletic director Michael Alford added. "We look forward to earning new revenue through the ACC's success incentives initiative, based on our continued excellence. We're grateful to the league for continuing to listen to our concerns."

Sixteen days ago, Oregon State athletic director Scott Barnes hopped on the phone to convey his school’s desire to preserve the Pac-12, in some form, as well as a cautious optimism that Cal and Stanford would be part of that mission.

Sixteen days later, it’s even more unclear what Oregon State can or will do, and with whom. The Pac-12 is effectively destroyed with the ACC formally absorbing Cal and Stanford on Friday morning, save for whatever intellectual property is left on the otherwise emptied shelves. Which left Barnes and school president Jayathi Murthy to take questions they had nearly no concrete answers for in a Zoom session with reporters.

“Although we had hoped for a better outcome here, thus outcome certainly was anticipated,” Barnes said. “Our plans relative to this consideration have been ongoing.”

Here are the takeaways from the half-hour session, in which Barnes and Murthy fielded queries that were screened and chosen by a school official:

• They still think there’s a way to recreate the Pac- 12. Maybe. “It is possible but there’s no question that’s much more complicated,” Murthy said. “The road ahead is much more arduous. We’re trying to figure out the best path forward while simultaneously pursuing other possibilities.”
• There are schools seemingly willing to join said recreated Pac-12. Maybe. “We aren’t position for absolute confirmation,” Barnes said, “but certainly the dialogue we’ve had represents a great path forward.”
• That said, yes, Oregon State has been in contact with existing leagues about coming aboard. “Absolutely we have,” Murthy said. And we’ve got a lot of very experienced people giving us advice and we’ve been consulting them on a regular basis. We’re deeply connected to (the Pac-12), aware of its reputation and reach, which is why we’re saying it’s so important to consider it as one of the directions to take seriously. But absolutely we’ve had conversations with various conferences. There’s a lot of creative thinking going on.”
• If we’re to believe Oregon State officials will absorb the input of current athletes on the path forward, apparently any league that creates a coast-to-coast dynamic is out of the question. “The two things that probably surface most in our conversations — one is nationally competing at the highest level,” Barnes said. “Secondly, and not necessarily in ranking, but the second item is not having to travel across the country to play. That is an impact on their experience, and perhaps their physical and mental well-being as well. Those two things — competing at the highest level and the notion of regionality again, not traveling across the country — were important to them.”
• While Barnes reiterated that any revenue from a new league will be less than what the Pac-12 provided, he declared that Oregon State won’t have to cut any sports. “Absolutely not,” the athletic director said. “We are committed to maintaining those sports. Whatever that may be, we are thinking about every single sport and how they align with new members of a conference. Each of our sports will have a home. Each of our sports will continue to flourish.”
• TV continues to rule all. Oregon State’s market size, as Barnes put it, didn’t create the “leverage” the school needed to position itself better. Or be proactive in this latest turn of the conference merry-go-round. “Our options are centrally tied to being in a small town and not being able to deliver TV audiences required in these media deals,” Murthy said. “That is a fact of our geographic location and it is not easily changed. It’s not easily solved. So there aren’t easy options for us to simply hop from conference to conference, even if we were willing to blow the Pac-12 up, which I’ve never been willing to do.”
• Washington State remains Oregon State’s BFF in these matters. “We’re wonderfully aligned,” Murthy said. “We’re closely connected. Our interests are aligned both athletically and academically. I’m very, very happy to have them as a partner.”
• It won’t take terribly long to figure out where Oregon State goes from here. “Fairly soon,” Murthy said, when asked about a timeline for finding a new home. “Weeks rather than months and certainly not years. We do have to decide where we’re going just because of scheduling and other pressures. You won’t have to wait very long. I certainly keep the speed issue in mind but making the right decision is the biggest thing. This is a very, very important decision and its effects will play out for years ahead.”

It's no secret that the Tigers always planned to vote no and have been aligned from the Board of Trustees down to the president and the athletic department. If you read between the lines on this one, it's not hard to know how Clemson feels.

The American Athletic Conference will “not look westward” for expansion following Friday’s news that the Atlantic Coast Conference is adding Stanford, Cal and SMU, AAC commissioner Mike Aresco said in a statement Friday.

Aresco said the AAC has investigated “a number of options, including consideration of the larger group of institutions in the Pacific time zone,” noting that his league will instead opt to focus its expansion efforts “on schools that allow for sensible and sustainable competition and student-athlete well-being within our strong geographic footprint.”

Where does that leave Washington State and Oregon State?

Read more here.

University of Iowa President Barbara Wilson spoke to the Presidential Committee on Athletics and was asked if the Big Ten was done expanding.

"I can't comment on that. But what I can tell you is that we're not making any decisions quickly. We're thinking deeply about the issues at hand and we're not making decisions to chase dollars right now. So even though it looks that way to some of our critics, that's not what we're doing."

"We're trying really hard not to respond to other people's urgent needs. We're trying to be more strategic as a conference. And that's not always easy to do."