[StanfordMatt]

I seem to be in the minority camp here...Today I have a smile on my face because Stanford just told the whole world "it's important to us to compete at the highest levels."   The B10 and B12 were not interested. We were very much stuck. Any move to the MWC or the WCC or whatever Independent/combination solution people were dreaming up would have resulted in the deterioration of so many of our perennial national championship contending teams. While the travel will be onerous, if you asked the players on these teams "which would you prefer - compete in the ACC with more travel or compete against the MWC?", I'm quite certain what the answer would be. Thank goodness we got this done.

Well said. We can compare this to what wasn’t there .. a Pacific Coast Conference ..or celebrate that we got what was there..membership in a power four conference .  It was a remarkable accomplishment to get this done. We had no negotiating leverage , no alternative and nothing any Power 4 conference needed. That is a very, very tough negotiating position.

That certainly is one way of looking at it. Respectfully, I disagree.

We’re essentially pimping our football program out, sending them cross country multiple times per season in exchange for revenue designed to keep the other programs afloat. Except wait a minute, we’re only getting pennies on the dollar in this deal so those programs’ futures are still tenuous at best.

The 12 ACC programs that ended up voting in favor of expansion did so to fatten their own pockets. None of those 12 have the ability to generate sizable revenue on their own (unlike UNC, Clemson and FSU), so they gladly agreed to take another check from ESPN for adding 3 programs while not sharing the proceeds with the newcomers. Not sure how much arm twisting that took from Stanford and Cal.

[StanfordMatt]

I seem to be in the minority camp here...Today I have a smile on my face because Stanford just told the whole world "it's important to us to compete at the highest levels."   The B10 and B12 were not interested. We were very much stuck. Any move to the MWC or the WCC or whatever Independent/combination solution people were dreaming up would have resulted in the deterioration of so many of our perennial national championship contending teams. While the travel will be onerous, if you asked the players on these teams "which would you prefer - compete in the ACC with more travel or compete against the MWC?", I'm quite certain what the answer would be. Thank goodness we got this done.

Well said. We can compare this to what wasn’t there .. a Pacific Coast Conference ..or celebrate that we got what was there..membership in a power four conference .  It was a remarkable accomplishment to get this done. We had no negotiating leverage , no alternative and nothing any Power 4 conference needed. That is a very, very tough negotiating position.

That certainly is one way of looking at it. Respectfully, I disagree.

We’re essentially pimping our football program out, sending them cross country multiple times per season in exchange for revenue designed to keep the other programs afloat. Except wait a minute, we’re only getting pennies on the dollar in this deal so those programs’ futures are still tenuous at best.

The 12 ACC programs that ended up voting in favor of expansion did so to fatten their own pockets. None of those 12 have the ability to generate sizable revenue on their own (unlike UNC, Clemson and FSU), so they gladly agreed to take another check from ESPN for adding 3 programs while not sharing the proceeds with the newcomers. Not sure how much arm twisting that took from Stanford and Cal.