08-07-2023, 02:43 PM
Principle No. 1: Keeping the Pac-12 together was preferable in all respects. Regional rivalries, good competition, limited burden on student-athletes. Woulda loved to keep it together. But we can't have that, obviously. So, of the available, realistic options that keep funding our athletic department at a decent level, it would seem to be down to (1) join the Big 12, or (2) join the ACC. Would've loved the Big Ten along with Cal/USC/UCLA/UW/UO, but that doesn't seem to be an option either. Given that choice, I think the ACC is far, far preferable.
Let's think about how this works for most sports. For football, it's fine. It's still a there-and-back trip for four weeks a year. But
Instead of flying 2-3 hours to Seattle, Phoenix, Denver, Salt Lake, etc. (which would have been my strong preference), we'd be flying 5-6 hours to Raleigh-Durham, Richmond, Miami, Atlanta, etc. That's not insignificant! It's a real burden, but it's frustrating that football is the sport driving all of this change while it's the sport that will see the fewest additional burdens. And it's not all that different to fly to those cities than it would have been to fly to Cincinnati, Orlando, Morgantown, Des Moines, Houston, or Kansas City.
And just thinking about competition levels for the non-football/basketball sports I care about:
Baseball: The ACC is a fantastic baseball conference. Yes, the travel would be brutal. They play approximately 30 conference games, split up into ten 3-game series, so that's 5 cross-country road trips. It sucks. But the competition would be terrific. And by contrast, the Big Ten and the Big 12 are middling baseball conferences. The SEC is king right now, but the ACC isn't that far behind with several perennial Top 25 programs like Wake, UVA, Duke, Miami, etc. Big Ten baseball is mid.
Women's Tennis: While the SEC has made a run, the ACC is still the top conference in the country for me. UNC, Duke, UVA, NC State, Miami, Georgia Tech. I mean, my goodness. Big Ten women's tennis is mid. (UCLA and USC are immediately going to be the class of that conference.) And yes, travel is going to be awful. Right now, the ACC has 14 schools that sponsor women's tennis, and they play a true round-robin of 13 matches. With Stanford and Cal, that would be 16. Do they go to 15 conference matches? If so, that's four road trips to get 7-8 matches. You could build around Spring Break and do, say, Duke/UNC one weekend and Wake/NC State the following weekend. But no doubt, it's bad. But it would've been bad in the Big Ten or Big 12, but with the 5-hour flights being more like 4-hour flights.
And my goodness, what a good swimming conference that would be, and I don't see that scheduling would have to change much that way--we could still have regional duals and nationwide invitationals like usual, though the flight to ACCs would be crappier than the flight to Pac-12s, of course. MPSF type sports like water polo, men's volleyball, men's gymnastics would seem to be unaffected. But for the all the other team sports that play games/matches against single opponents at a time, yeah, the travel is gonna suck. But it would've sucked in the Big Ten and Big 12, too. Bad travel is a given of all options that see Stanford continue to exist in a major conference. (I certainly recognize we don't all share that goal, of course.)
Random thought: Uh, we'd probably get better recruiting in lacrosse and field hockey?
Let's think about how this works for most sports. For football, it's fine. It's still a there-and-back trip for four weeks a year. But
Instead of flying 2-3 hours to Seattle, Phoenix, Denver, Salt Lake, etc. (which would have been my strong preference), we'd be flying 5-6 hours to Raleigh-Durham, Richmond, Miami, Atlanta, etc. That's not insignificant! It's a real burden, but it's frustrating that football is the sport driving all of this change while it's the sport that will see the fewest additional burdens. And it's not all that different to fly to those cities than it would have been to fly to Cincinnati, Orlando, Morgantown, Des Moines, Houston, or Kansas City.
And just thinking about competition levels for the non-football/basketball sports I care about:
Baseball: The ACC is a fantastic baseball conference. Yes, the travel would be brutal. They play approximately 30 conference games, split up into ten 3-game series, so that's 5 cross-country road trips. It sucks. But the competition would be terrific. And by contrast, the Big Ten and the Big 12 are middling baseball conferences. The SEC is king right now, but the ACC isn't that far behind with several perennial Top 25 programs like Wake, UVA, Duke, Miami, etc. Big Ten baseball is mid.
Women's Tennis: While the SEC has made a run, the ACC is still the top conference in the country for me. UNC, Duke, UVA, NC State, Miami, Georgia Tech. I mean, my goodness. Big Ten women's tennis is mid. (UCLA and USC are immediately going to be the class of that conference.) And yes, travel is going to be awful. Right now, the ACC has 14 schools that sponsor women's tennis, and they play a true round-robin of 13 matches. With Stanford and Cal, that would be 16. Do they go to 15 conference matches? If so, that's four road trips to get 7-8 matches. You could build around Spring Break and do, say, Duke/UNC one weekend and Wake/NC State the following weekend. But no doubt, it's bad. But it would've been bad in the Big Ten or Big 12, but with the 5-hour flights being more like 4-hour flights.
And my goodness, what a good swimming conference that would be, and I don't see that scheduling would have to change much that way--we could still have regional duals and nationwide invitationals like usual, though the flight to ACCs would be crappier than the flight to Pac-12s, of course. MPSF type sports like water polo, men's volleyball, men's gymnastics would seem to be unaffected. But for the all the other team sports that play games/matches against single opponents at a time, yeah, the travel is gonna suck. But it would've sucked in the Big Ten and Big 12, too. Bad travel is a given of all options that see Stanford continue to exist in a major conference. (I certainly recognize we don't all share that goal, of course.)
Random thought: Uh, we'd probably get better recruiting in lacrosse and field hockey?