Somebody in the ACC office thought it wise to leak to outlets like ESPN and The Athletic that the conference thinks Stanford and Cal are the solution to its money woes.
Whoever thinks this needs to be perp-walked out the door Tuesday morning.
Seriously, somebody in Jim Phillips’ inner circle wants you to think Stanford and Cal keep FSU from jumping to the SEC and UVA and North Carolina from going to the Big Ten?
Wow.
Just, wow.
This is getting to be embarrassing.
The population of the San Francisco DMA is 2.4 million, which would bring, roughly speaking, about $144 million a year to ACC member schools through the expanded reach of the ACC Network into that market, or about $9 million per school.
This moves the needle a tiny bit closer to where it would need to be – the ACC is currently paying its member schools about $25 million per school per year less than what the Big Ten and SEC are paying its member schools, a figure that approaches $50 million per year per school by the 2029-2030 academic sports year.
So, we’d be roughly a quarter of the way there.
For that extra $9 million per year per school, the current ACC member schools add road trips to the Left Coast not just for football, but … everything else.
The bottom lines still probably come out ahead, balanced on the backs of the kids, but, enough to justify the invites?
Um, no.
And then, what about the bottom lines for Stanford and Cal?
And before you say, well, the Pac-Whatever is about to implode, a couple of things there.
One, the Pac-Whatever is going to exist, in some form, going forward.
The four remaining schools, including Stanford and Cal, along with Washington State and Oregon State, have incentive, and a brand name, to try to rebuild by inviting other western schools into a new conference package.
They also could still have Apple TV interested in giving them a lifeline in the form of a couple or three hundred million a year to figure out how to move forward.
Two, what we’re hearing, and it seems pretty solid, is that Stanford and Cal themselves have invites to the Big Ten, in the event that UVA and UNC, for some reason, against their best interests, turn down what we’re told are active invites.
Basically, if UVA and UNC decide to stick with the ACC, Stanford and Cal are the consolation prize for the B1G.
So, either the ACC keeps UVA and UNC, or they get to add Stanford and Cal.
They don’t get them all.
Or in other words, Stanford and Cal don’t keep the ACC intact as is.
They’re part of the fallback.
But it’s not being sold that way.
The Stanford-Cal plan is being sold to ESPN and The Athletic as being part of the overall effort to build a stronger ACC.
Even if that was the plan, the math doesn’t add up.
The jig is up, man.
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Chris Graham
