California’s Fernando Mendoza and Stanford’s Ashton Daniels are quarterbacks for rival football programs in the Golden State, part of the long history of a rivalry known simply as the “Big Game.”
Last summer, they were united in their dismay at watching the Pac-12 disintegrate as a power conference, leaving their schools briefly without a home.
“Unsettling,” Daniels recalled.
“I would be lying if I said it wasn’t scary,” Mendoza said.
Yet on Tuesday, they were sitting in a hotel across the country representing their programs at the preseason football media days in their new Atlantic Coast Conference home. It’s part of the early stages of a partnership borne of timing: two elite universities and a conference trying to shore up its own future by reaching out of its Eastern Seaboard footprint to become a coast-to-coast superconference.
The next step comes this fall, as Stanford and Cal – along with SMU from the American Athletic Conference – integrate themselves into ACC play amid frequent-flier miles and reconfigured travel plans.
Then again, longer travel beats the alternative when it comes to the Cardinal and Bears keeping their seat at the power-conference table, with Stanford coach Troy Taylor saying the school was grateful to find “safe harbor.”
“I couldn’t imagine that the Pac-12 would ever disintegrate like that,” the former Cal quarterback said of the moves that scattered schools to the ACC, Big Ten and Big 12 while leaving behind Oregon State and Washington State.
“We’re a Power 4 team. We want to remain that in our school’s future. So we’re just excited to be in the ACC. … We feel very grateful.”
The ACC’s move to 17 football-playing members required a new scheduling model, which had the new schools facing one another as annual opponents in the league’s no-division format to protect the Stanford-Cal rivalry and offer regular games against their closest-proximity peers.
But Cal and Stanford each ended up with three trips to the Eastern Time Zone in their first league slate; the Bears visit Florida State, Pittsburgh and Wake Forest; while the Cardinal will face Syracuse, Clemson and North Carolina State. And that means changing normal routines that would have teams arrive for a game the day before kickoff.
Instead, Taylor and Cal coach Justin Wilcox both said they’d travel on Thursdays to give extra acclimation time. Wilcox added that the Bears would get “the biggest plane that Delta makes” with lie-down seating.
“We’ve got our strength-and-conditioning staff,” he said. “They’ll be doing their little (exercise). We’ll get them up once during the trip. They’ll also be able to utilize the time for film study or schoolwork. It’s not going to be a thing.”
Virginia Tech coach Brent Pry said the Hokies have already been planning their trip to Stanford on Oct. 5, too. They’re also following the Thursday model.
“A lot of planning already has gone into the Stanford trip, to make sure that we’re going to give our guys the best chance to play well, to feel good,” Pry said. “There’s not a lot of experience with it, but there are some folks out there that have made those types of trips. So we’ve reached out to a lot of people. We’ve had multiple meetings about what that trip’s going to look like.”
Cal and Stanford players, meanwhile, shrugged off worries about the multiple cross-country flights in league play. Mendoza volunteered that he sleeps on planes anyway and added: “If you let it affect you mentally, it’s going to affect you mentally.”
“It’s similar to the NFL in a way because NFL teams do that all the time – just travel from state to state, coast to coast,” fellow Bears quarterback Chandler Rogers said. “And it’s really preparation for the next level, I believe.”
Yet getting here hasn’t been easy.
It’s been less than a year since the ACC voted to add the three schools on the eve of last season, which came weeks after Oregon and Washington decided to follow USC and UCLA – announced in 2022 – to the Big Ten and ultimately send the rest of the league schools scrambling for new homes.
Along the way, Cardinal and Bears players could only helplessly watch it unfold. Stanford linebacker Tristan Sinclair said he even started studying up on the ACC, down to exactly who was in the league beyond the headliners, even as he mourned the Pac-12’s fall.
“I’m excited to be in the ACC, I’m excited to play new teams,” Sinclair said. “But yeah, it’s just a shame that it kind of came to this, I guess. Not to rag on the ACC at all, it’s more so just the larger state (of realignment). It’s a bummer.”
The ACC’s expansion is part of its multiyear push to close the revenue gap behind the Big Ten and SEC. Commissioner Jim Phillips said Monday that it will create $600 million in additional incremental revenue gains through the league’s current ESPN deal running through 2036, with most of that money going to the standing ACC members over the next decade.
For the former Pac-12 members, Cal and Stanford will take reduced payouts (around 30%) for the first seven years before moving to 70% in Year 8, 75% in Year 9 and then a full-member share in the 10th year.
The ACC has been building on years of record revenue hauls and distributed an average of $44.8 million to its football-playing members for the 2022-23 season compared to $33.6 million for the now-decimated Pac-12 in that same year. Yet even with that revenue bump, it took lengthy discussions for the ACC to even get to its expansion vote that wasn’t unanimous, with Clemson, FSU and North Carolina opposing the move.
Later, FSU and Clemson even filed lawsuits seeking to challenge the ACC’s ability to charge hundreds of millions of dollars for leaving the conference. Yet with no end in sight for those cases, everyone is locked into place — though now with two schools from the country’s most populous state on board.
“The fact that the ACC accepted us, I know some teams didn’t like it, but we’re extremely excited to be here,” Daniels said. “And it’s going to be a lot of fun.”
Reporting by The Associated Press.
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