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Andrea Adelson, ESPN Senior Writer
STANFORD COACH TROY TAYLOR was at breakfast at the team hotel in Hawai’i, hours before the kickoff to the 2023 season, when he learned the ACC had officially voted to accept the Cardinal, Cal and SMU as new league members.
Although Stanford had a game to play that night, Taylor’s mind raced ahead to the new reality the team suddenly had to confront. Chief among his thoughts: lengthy road trips to the East Coast. Taylor turned to senior associate athletic director Matt Doyle, the Cardinal’s longtime football operations director, and said, “Well, I guess our trip to Australia is off.”
At that point, Stanford was deep in conversations to open the 2025 season in Australia. But given the extensive travel that would be required as ACC members, it no longer made sense to play games in other countries. New plans were crafted almost immediately at all three schools. They had roughly 11 months to prepare for a new world.
For Cal and Stanford, that meant much more from a logistical perspective, given their nearly 3,000-mile distance from league headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina, where all three schools will be featured at ACC Kickoff this week.
Think Google Maps to calculate the best route for equipment trucks to drive from Palo Alto, California, to Syracuse, New York. Think charter flight costs, consulting sleep experts, revisiting how and when to leave for trips, scouting new teams, and trying to minimize missed classroom time.
“It’s been a whirlwind,” said Josh Hummel, Cal senior associate athletic director for facilities, events and capital projects. “There’s not really an exact science to it. I don’t think there’s a playbook that says, ‘Here’s what you do when switching conferences.'”
LUCKILY FOR CAL and Stanford, a few California-based schools had already started solving this particular logistical puzzle — UCLA and USC announced moves multiple time zones away to the Big Ten in 2022. Hummel said Cal had conversations with UCLA, particularly about travel.
Monthly calls between Cal and Stanford were soon arranged so they could exchange ideas, too. Both schools decided they would leave for their long-distance road games on Thursdays, one day earlier than usual. Both schools are taking bigger planes for their trips, not only for the comfort level of their players but for the cargo space. Cal, for example, signed a charter deal with Delta and will use Boeing 767-300 planes for travel this year, with a minimum of 210 seats. The lone exception comes on the trip to Florida State. Because Tallahassee has a small regional airport, Cal has to use a slightly smaller 757 plane.
The Cal and Stanford equipment trucks will now depart their respective campuses on Mondays for a Saturday kickoff to be able to make the cross-country trek with enough time to set up the sideline and locker room. Two drivers will take turns driving — 10 hours on, 10 hours off.
The long return trip home means the trucks will not return to California until Tuesday or Wednesday. So game gear — including uniforms, coach and staff laundry, will have to be packed on the airplane to be cleaned and ready for the next week. Exercise bikes, coolers, some medical equipment, rain gear and cooling fans will stay on the trucks.
Stanford ended up with back-to-back ACC road trips to the East Coast this year, starting at Syracuse on Friday, Sept. 20. Eight days later, the Cardinal play at Clemson. Stanford decided the team would fly home after the Syracuse game for multiple reasons. First, the Cardinal have an extra day to recover between games. Second, the fall semester at Stanford begins Monday, Sept. 23, and it would have been difficult for players to miss the entire first week of school. The team will fly out Thursday for the Clemson game.
But the equipment truck will stay in the East for the duration. Stanford equipment managers will pack up the truck immediately after the Syracuse game, then fly home with the team. The contracted drivers will then drive the truck to a satellite storage yard in Virginia until it is time to head to Clemson.
Both schools have three ACC games apiece in the Eastern time zone, plus additional nonconference games in the Central time zone (Stanford at Notre Dame; Cal at Auburn, plus a conference game at SMU). Representatives from Cal and Stanford did site visits months ago to check out their new road stadiums from an operations standpoint and choose team hotels.
In all, the schools will combine to travel more than 44,000 miles this season. Given all the added travel, Doyle estimates Stanford’s charter budget has doubled. It will be even higher in 2025 with an additional charter flight: The Cardinal have games at Hawai’i, Miami, North Carolina, Virginia and SMU. Doyle said that next season Stanford will have to cover the third-longest distance of any college football season ever.
Still, both California-based coaches said they have approached the extra travel with a bit of a shrug. In their minds, the biggest differences in their plans are leaving a day early, flying on bigger planes, and emphasizing the need to stay hydrated on the long flights to and from campus. Otherwise, the football preparation remains the same.
“I don’t see it as being an issue,” Taylor said. “Obviously, it’s a newer thing in terms of going [to the East Coast] three times in a season, but it’s been done before. NFL teams do it, so we’re not the first to broach this. I feel confident that we’ll be able to adapt and perform.”
“If you were in our building on a day-to-day basis, you would’ve thought we’ve been in the ACC for the last 10 years in terms of how we operate,” Cal’s Justin Wilcox said. “It’s not this seismic shift in how we go about our daily business.”
INDEED, THIS ALL remains a work in progress. Cal and Stanford, in need of a lifeline after the Pac-12 broke apart last summer, had begun planning for the possibility of a conference switch after realignment shook the Pac-12 in 2022. There had been initial hesitation from ACC presidents about expanding to the West Coast, and it took a flipped vote from NC State last summer to get expansion across the finish line.
The move to add those two programs, as well as SMU, was seen as a way to stabilize the conference moving forward, a notion that was further crystallized after Florida State and Clemson filed suit against the league, challenging its grant of rights and withdrawal penalties.
While those lawsuits are pending, the ACC is moving forward as a 17-member football conference — growing its television markets from the East Coast to the West Coast and into Dallas. Although there remain questions about the ACC’s composition long term, commissioner Jim Phillips remains bullish about its future.
“The addition of these three schools is only doubling down about where the ACC has been in the past,” Phillips said. “This is as good of a league as there is in the country.”
Phillips has done his part to try to assuage any concerns presidents, administrators and players might have had about the added travel. Shortly after expansion was approved last summer, Phillips went to all three campuses and met with key stakeholders to lay out ACC governance structure, financials and the way the league runs its sport championships.
The work of putting together schedules began almost immediately afterward, and the ACC prioritized limiting cross-country travel as much as possible. In sports outside football, the scheduling model was made specifically to feature multiple games in the same region over a three- or four-day period. For example, Stanford women’s soccer is scheduled to play Wake Forest and NC State on one trip in September.
Cal running back Jaydn Ott says he is not concerned about the extra travel for the football program. He believes the move to the ACC will help bring more national attention to the Bears — especially when they have an opportunity to open conference play at Florida State in September.
“It’s a big step up coming from the Pac-12,” Ott said. “There are not too many people watching Pac-12 football in the Midwest and on the East Coast. So I think joining the ACC gives us more visibility to people, and playing these different teams, we’ll finally be able to prove to people that we can match up with some of the best out there.”
There is one more key logistical difference with the conference move: travel roster size. The Pac-12 travel roster size for conference games was capped at 74 but was unlimited for nonconference games. In the ACC, the travel roster size is 80 for conference and nonconference games. So now, for example, Stanford will have to make decisions about whom to bring to Notre Dame, something it has not had to worry about in the past. The Stanford-Cal game could also potentially be impacted. Doyle said that the schools had been allowed to have their entire rosters on the sideline for their annual rivalry game and that he plans to ask the ACC whether that will be allowed to continue.
Travel impacts go beyond bigger planes and scrambled body clocks. Added travel also means more missed class time. Stanford set up a faculty task force to discuss options to ensure as little disruption as possible. Both schools have the ability for remote class work and have discussed travel impacts with faculty. Hummel said Cal plans to be more proactive in carving out time on each road trip to ensure the conference room in the team hotel is available for players to have a dedicated spot for their academics.
“We’re further away. There are longer flights,” Wilcox said. “There’s no denying that, but at the end of the day, we don’t think it’s that big of a deal. We’re not talking about that after the game because we missed a tackle. That’s not coming up. This is not going to be a thing for us.”
The combo you never knew you needed.#PonyUpDallas x @theACC pic.twitter.com/O0nB6L051Z
– SMU Football (@SMUFB) July 1, 2024
SMU ATHLETIC DIRECTOR Rick Hart likes to joke that SMU was in three conferences in his first year on the job in 2012 — finishing out its final season in Conference USA with a commitment to join the Big East. But then the Big East fell apart and turned into the American Athletic Conference, where the Mustangs began play in 2013.
Unlike Cal and Stanford, members of the Pac-12 for more than 100 years, SMU has been searching for a return to a power conference since the Southwest Conference disintegrated in 1996. Although the ACC is the fourth conference SMU will call home since then, Hart says he believes this move has returned the program to the promised land.
“A dream come true,” he likes to say.
“This is really the culmination of 37 years of investments and efforts and outcomes,” Hart said. “The excitement level is off the charts.”
To that point, SMU has raised a record $159 million since its announced move to the ACC to help fund not only programs on a Power 4 level but also the athletic department. To gain acceptance into the ACC, SMU agreed to forgo ACC television revenue for its first nine years in the league.
“We very much view it as an investment,” Hart said. “We didn’t really give anything up relative to what we had or what we were going to have. We felt confident that from a competitive perspective and a resource perspective, we could make up for it, which is mostly what that fundraising effort is directed toward.”
SMU has indeed invested in football in recent years, including a new $100 million end zone complex in its stadium. It also has boosted its on-field profile, winning 43 games over the past five years, including 11 in 2023. SMU returns 15 starters, including quarterback Preston Stone and defensive end Elijah Roberts, and has a foundation firmly set.
Considering SMU is leaving a conference with teams in the same geographic footprint as the ACC, the Mustangs have not had to deal with the same unfamiliar travel logistics as Cal and Stanford. Hart pointed out that they will not have a flight longer than three hours, and the school’s base in Dallas makes it easy to book direct flights.
“Not much changes for us from that perspective,” Hart said. “Our student-athletes, our coaches, our support staff are all pretty familiar with what that task is.”
What makes this move different from the changes for Cal and Stanford is the transition to playing Power 4 football. To that end, coach Rhett Lashlee has spent extensive time talking to other coaches who have navigated the transition from Group of 5 to the power level, including Gus Malzahn at UCF, Utah coach Kyle Whittingham and former TCU coach Gary Patterson.
The biggest piece of advice from a roster perspective: Depth is crucial, particularly on the offensive and defensive lines. To that end, SMU signed 13 linemen from the transfer portal, including 12 who played in power conferences previously.
SMU has increased staff salaries as a result of the ACC move and has doubled the size of its recruiting department, which now contains nine staffers. SMU has been heavily reliant on the portal in recent years, but Lashlee believes their high school recruiting efforts will see huge gains now that they are in a power conference.
The Mustangs have three ESPN 300 commitments for the class of 2025. SMU had never had more than one in a single class.
“There was a caliber of player we just weren’t going to get out of high school because those kids want to play on the biggest stage,” Lashlee said. “The move to the ACC means we can now compete for the best of the best out of high school. At the same time, we still have the ability to be a transfer destination.”
Even after spending the past year preparing, all three schools are still waiting for the move to feel real.
“For the last year, it’s been a ton of planning and a ton of meetings,” Hummel said. “Until you actually make that first trip and play your first road game at an ACC school, you can’t really feel that, ‘Wow, this has happened.'”
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