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.

“We are thrilled to welcome three world-class institutions to the ACC, and we look forward to having them compete as part of our amazing league,” ACC commissioner Jim Phillips said in a statement. “Throughout the evaluation process, the ACC Board of Directors, led by (Virginia) President (James) Ryan, was deliberate in prioritizing the best possible athletic and academic experience for our student-athletes and in ensuring that the three universities would strengthen the league in all possible ways. Cal, SMU and Stanford will be terrific members of the ACC and we are proud to welcome their student-athletes, coaches, staff and entire campus community, alumni and fans.”

The new additions 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.

“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.”

Said Stanford president Richard Saller, “Student-athletes come to Stanford to pursue their highest academic and athletic potential, and joining the ACC gives us the ability to continue offering them that opportunity at a national level. We appreciate the dedicated efforts of Commissioner Jim Phillips and the leaders of the ACC member institutions to create this promising path forward.”

During the discussions over the past month, Stanford and Cal had 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 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.

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.

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.