Getty Image
The Atlantic Coast Conference is dead. Long live the Atlantic Coast Conference.
Okay, well, not technically dead. At least not in the Pac-12 sense of the word.
But in the sense that the ACC should probably find a new named after it added Stanford, Cal, and SMU to the fray on Friday morning as part of the next step of conference realignment.
Now, we’re certainly not geography experts over here at BroBible dot com. But SMU, Cal and Stanford are very decidedly not on the Atlantic Coast. I mean, SMU isn’t on a coast at all and Cal and Stanford reside about as far from the Atlantic Coast as you can get in the contiguous United States.
Then again, the Big Ten hasn’t had 10 team for over two decades, so what can ya do?
The move comes less than 24 hours after the University of North Carolina, one of the ACC’s longstanding members, vehemently opposed the additions.
“The strong majority of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Board of Trustees opposes the proposed expansion of the Atlantic Coast Conference to include Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and Southern Methodist University,” chairman David L. Boliek Jr. and vice chair John P. Preyer said.
“Although we respect the academic excellence and the athletic programs of those institutions, the travel distances for routine in-conference competitive play are too great for this arrangement to make sense for our student athletes, coaches, alumni and fans. Furthermore, the economics of this newly imagined transcontinental conference do not sufficiently address the income disparity ACC members face. Without ironclad assurances that the proposed expansion serves the interest of UNC-Chapel Hill, we believe it should be voted down.”
Nevertheless, conference officials and the remaining ACC schools proceeded anyway, and thus the Across Coasts Conference was born (you can thank for me that one later, ACC).
UNC, meanwhile, may not be long for the conference. The Big 10 is reportedly interested in the program, while Florida State may either proceed or follow it out the door.