Stanford head coach Troy Taylor speaks at the NCAA college football Pac-12 media day Friday, July 21, 2023, in Las Vegas.
Lucas Peltier/AP
College football’s latest round of musical chairs has left Cal and Stanford standing in the corner for now. If the Cardinal have their way, though, that won’t be the case for long. ACC leadership met to discuss expansion Tuesday, and according to ESPN, “Stanford expects some kind of resolution by the end of the week.”
There’s no question what resolution Stanford is hoping for: an invitation to the ACC, as ridiculous as that sounds. The A and the first C stand for “Atlantic Coast”; conference headquarters in Charlotte are a mere 2,600 miles away from Palo Alto. No matter. It looks like ACC or bust for the two Bay Area schools. There are only four major conferences left: The Big 12 is “done” expanding after raiding the Pac-12 last week, SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey claimed Tuesday he had zero interest in adding new schools, and the Big Ten has so far not reciprocated any Cal/Stanford interest. That leaves the ACC.
One option Stanford appears pointedly not interested in is some type of merger with the Mountain West. Stanford football coach Troy Taylor spoke to reporters after Tuesday’s practice and said he had zero desire to step down to college football’s middle class.
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“I think the players that committed to us and came here, they want to play Power 5 football, and that is what our intention is with this university,” Taylor said. “I can’t imagine anything else.”
He sounded like a slightly less existential Kyle Shanahan, never a good sign. “People used to have to come across the country in a covered wagon — it would take them months and they’d be completely different people by the time they got there,” he said. “We get on a plane for five hours, six hours, that’s not the end of the world. You get drinks served to you and some snacks, and it’s not that bad.”
It’s true that a handful of cross-country flights is not necessarily devastating to a football team that plays once a week for half the school year. The problem, obviously, is those pesky “non-revenue” sports that compete more often, or in a more compressed period.