After a lot of speculation that a new ACC could be announced before fall hits, the league members voted this morning to bring Cal, Stanford, and SMU into the conference. This now means that there will be 18 members of the Atlantic Coast Conference, with three of them hailing from the west coast.
Here is what ACC commissioner Jim Phillips had to say about the addition of the three schools to WRAL:
“This will help the ACC in multiple ways.”
Let’s just focus on this very simple, yet confusing comment first. Nobody has actually stated how the ACC is helped in this particular situation, because what we know so far is that the former Pac-12 trio will take less money than everybody else, ESPN as far as we know aren’t going to give the league any money that was reported at the time of this being written, and logistics have become extremely messy for everyone.