Editor’s note: ACC presidents have voted to add Stanford, Cal and SMU
The American Athletic Conference has “contingency plans” if SMU were to depart for the ACC, commissioner Mike Aresco said Wednesday. Aresco said the league can operate with an odd number of members, if needed, and that if the Dallas-based SMU were to leave, the conference would look smart for having added the University of North Texas, which arrived from Conference USA this year.
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Aresco and his league are caught in the middle of a waiting game right now. The ACC has been discussing whether to add Stanford, Cal and SMU for weeks, but the league hasn’t taken a formal vote on expansion yet. A meeting of ACC presidents was initially scheduled for Monday night, but it was canceled following the on-campus shooting at the University of North Carolina. As of Wednesday evening, it had not yet been rescheduled.
Aresco said he has been communicating with SMU leadership and that president Gerald Turner “doesn’t owe (him) anything” because he’s been a terrific partner since helping to create the league from the ashes of the old Big East.
Speaking to reporters following a meeting of the College Football Playoff management committee in Dallas on Wednesday, Aresco reiterated his opposition to the terms “Power 5” and “Group of 5.” He believes they directly led to the latest round of realignment and to the Bay Area schools’ pursuit of the ACC alongside SMU.
“I’ve talked about how destructive this whole P5 thing can be,” Aresco said. “It’s all about branding. It’s all about the P5 conferences. We heard, ‘Well, Stanford and Cal have no place to go.’ They had a place to go. It may not be the place they wanted to go ideally, but they weren’t orphans. They had a chance to go somewhere.
“There’s this desperation now because of the P5 branding. That’s really what’s going on. … I understand the issue of money, and it’s based on TV deals. But guys are willing to go for virtually nothing because they feel like they have to have that — they feel that they need that branding.”
Aresco said he expects the ACC to make a final decision on expansion “fairly soon.”
“I don’t really think you can go on too much longer,” he said. “None of this is really healthy.”
Other schools waiting for the fallout of the ACC’s decision are Oregon State and Washington State, which could be the final two schools left in what was the Pac-12. Both the Mountain West and AAC have made it clear that they are interested in adding them, though Aresco declined to discuss that further on the record.
Required reading
- Mandel: ACC adding Stanford, Cal and SMU makes perfect sense and no sense at all
- SMU football sees a win-win future between realignment buzz and CFP expansion
(Photo: Matthew Visinsky / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
