The ACC is adding Cal, Stanford and SMU. Here’s how it affects Clemson

Clemson is getting some West Coast neighbors.

The ACC is officially expanding for the first time in a decade, announcing Friday that Cal and Stanford will join the conference from the Pac-12 and Southern Methodist will join from the American Athletic starting in 2024.

Dallas-based SMU will join effective July 1, 2024, and Cal and Stanford will join effective Aug. 2, 2024, according to an ACC news release. Multiple outlets including ESPN and Sports Illustrated reported the move earlier Friday morning.

Clemson was a consistent “no” vote on ACC expansion throughout the process and voted against the expansion in Friday’s meeting of the ACC board of directors, a source close to the situation told The State.

The final vote was 12-3, per ESPN, with Clemson, Florida State and UNC voting against expansion and N.C. State — which opposed the expansion earlier this month — flipping to a “yes” and serving as the swing vote in the meeting of school chancellors and presidents.

“Clemson’s leadership has been aligned and consistent throughout this process, and continues to position our University for long-term success,” the school said Friday in a statement posted to the platform X (formerly Twitter). “We respect the conference membership’s decision and welcome the University of California-Berkeley, Southern Methodist University and Stanford University to the ACC.”

Despite Clemson’s opposition, the move’s now a reality. And it’ll bring more money, more travel and, most notably, minimal changes to athletic director Graham Neff’s continuously stated goal of “looking out and acting in the best interests” of the school. Here’s a closer look at how the ACC expansion news affects the Tigers.

Clemson gets money … but how much?

ACC expansion had lost steam and felt like a “long shot” over recent weeks, according to a Yahoo Sports report, until the distribution of new financial models showed adding the schools could net the ACC an additional $72 million annually.

That’s obviously enticing to the league at large, given it’s trying to find any and all ways to make up a growing revenue gap with the SEC and the Big Ten, two competing Power Five conferences who are already distributing about $20 million more to their schools annually.

Sure, adding Cal, Stanford and SMU will give the ACC an additional $72 million annually. But how much will that benefit an individual school year-to-year?

Even with SMU entering the ACC with no TV revenue for nine years and Cal and Stanford expected to enter at a roughly 30% share of TV revenue for seven years, according to Yahoo reports, that $72 million quickly drops to $30 million when accounting for the Cal and Stanford shares and travel costs.

Split evenly, that’s about $2.2 million extra per school — a significant chunk of change, to be clear, but a relative drop in the bucket in the face of projected $30 million to $40 million deficits that could give SEC and Big Ten schools an upper hand on ACC schools in head coaching salaries, assistant coach money pools, facilities, recruiting and other fields.

Unequal revenue potential?

A more enticing question: How much could this expansion benefit a school if that lingering $30 million gets lumped into the ACC’s “success incentive initiative” plan endorsed earlier this summer as opposed to distributed equally among schools?

That move might be more up Clemson’s alley.

Neff and Florida State AD Michael Alford have been publicly and privately pushing for a new revenue distribution system for well over a year and got their wish — sort of — in May when the ACC’s board of directors endorsed a plan to reward its most successful schools in the revenue sports.

Essentially, money generated by schools making College Football Playoff, major football bowl games and NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments will be reserved for those schools alone — instead of being distributed equally.

Alford, the FSU athletic director, has estimated that could give a school an extra $10 million to $15 million annually in, say, a successful football season. Toss the extra revenue from the Cal, Stanford and SMU additions into that pot — which, per Yahoo, is a possibility — and it gets more enticing.

But the ACC still hasn’t hammered out a formal structure for this new revenue-sharing system, which is scheduled to take effect for the 2024-25 athletic year.

Hitting the road

Adding a school from Texas and two schools from California is obviously going to impact travel plans for an athletic program based in Upstate South Carolina.

Lots of that strain will be placed on athletes in Olympic sports, too, such as men’s and women’s soccer, men’s and women’s tennis and volleyball.

Excluding any takeoff/departure logistics and/or delays, Clemson is about a five-hour plane ride from the Stanford and Cal campuses and a two-hour plane ride from SMU’s campus.

The SMU distance isn’t too earth-shattering — Clemson has been taking similarly distanced trips to Boston College, Miami and Syracuse for over a decade — but trips to Cal and Stanford would be the longest on their conference docket.

Such a time commitment maybe isn’t the biggest ordeal for a football team taking one weekend West Coast trip every other year. But that can add up for teams playing numerous games against conference opponents — especially midweek — and seriously alter class schedules for athletes.

According to a Friday report from Yahoo Sports, travel logistics are already being considered. As Yahoo’s Ross Dellenger wrote: “In one proposal circulated among officials, each of a school’s sports programs would be scheduled to travel to Stanford and Cal only once every other year.”

What’s next for Clemson?

Clemson may handle its business more privately as opposed to FSU — which blasted the ACC on a public board of trustees meeting Aug. 2 — but the Tigers continue to monitor their standing in the conference and any potential exit options.

The ACC adding three more teams won’t change that.

The Tigers haven’t been as explicitly tied to realignment reports as they were last summer, when national reports linked them to both the SEC and the Big Ten. But they continue to “work silently in the background exploring options” and research “whether they could break the conference’s grant of rights,” according to an Aug. 3 report from 247Sports.

One date of note is Aug. 15, 2024, next year’s deadline for schools to inform the ACC they’ll be leaving the conference and compete in a new conference starting in 2025. Recent reports from TigerIllustrated.com and TigerNet have indicated that, if an exit plan does form, that’s a time frame to watch for Clemson.

Clemson will not comment on any realignment reports, an athletics department spokesperson told The State.

Here’s how Neff, Clemson’s second-year athletic director, summarized the school’s thinking back in May at a Prowl & Growl event: “We continue to talk about it a lot, at all levels of the institution, to continue to position and do what’s best for Clemson … We’re going to continue to be prepared for what the landscape looks like in the future. It’s the highest priority for us.”

Clemson football coach Dabo Swinney, speaking to reporters in a scheduled availability ahead of the No. 9 Tigers’ season opener at Duke on Monday, said the move didn’t surprise him.

“I just focus on what I control,” Swinney said. “I don’t control any of that stuff. I don’t get distracted by any of that. So I think ‘not surprised’ is my reaction. Nothing really surprises me anymore when it comes to college football. Those are certainly three really good institutions, for sure.”