The schools must make difficult decisions and prepare a contingency plan in case their new home collapses.
Cal’s new chancellor, Richard Lyons, begins his term on July 1. Stanford’s incoming president, Jonathan Levin, takes over one month later.
Daunting as they are, the logistics of competing in the ACC are amateur hour for the Cardinal and Bears compared to navigating the roiling landscape. Nobody knows, because Lyons and Levin haven’t taken charge of their universities, much less laid out a master plan for athletics. So allow us to offer a few suggestions. The list below isn’t long, but it’s wide. Each layer carries complexities, both on campus and across the terrain.The move into the ACC, which becomes official on Aug. 2, constitutes a fresh start for both football programs — and the opportunity to remake their images locally.
But the current approach, with football kept at a distance and viewed as a necessary evil, will guarantee continued mediocrity, ongoing irrelevance and ultimately, a one-way ticket into the competitive abyss. You know what else flows from winning? Applications for admission, which subsequently allows acceptances rate to drop and selectivity to rise.
And now comes a next-level challenge: Competing in the ACC while receiving less than a full share of the conference’s media rights revenue for most of the 12-year arrangement. But tacit approval isn’t enough. Campus leadership must make clear to every constituent and stakeholder — board members and tenured professors alike — that NIL opportunities are not only acceptable but encouraged and beneficial for athletes in every sport.The Bay Area schools were caught by surprise when the Pac-12 imploded last summer, according to multiple conference sources. They cannot make the same mistake again.
Fox controls the Big Ten’s media rights through its majority stake in the Big Ten Network and thus is responsible for funding any realignment efforts. Make the case to network executives that Fox and the Big Ten would benefit from the presence of two world-class schools in the Bay Area, with all its high-tech money and thousands of Big Ten alums.
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