So… Cal, Stanford, & SMU are still ACC options??

Right now, with apparently the Atlantic Coast Conference about to dip their toes back into a coast-to-coast area, we bring in our friend from the News & Observer, the one and only Luke DeCock, on X at Luke DeCock. All right, sir, a week ago we thought it might be dead. I think it is not dead. Maybe it's mostly dead, as Miracle Max tried to tell us in The Princess Bride, but they put that chocolate thing, chocolate coating, so it goes down easier. They put that chocolate coating in and apparently it's not quite dead that we might be able to revive it. You got to work the bellows. I just have Carol Kane racing around the studio in my head now.

Yeah, well, she'd do a better job running this league than the presidents, that's for sure. Yeah, no, you can't kill it. It's undead. It's like Bram Stoker's ACC. No, my position hasn't changed. I think this is a terrible idea.

I think it's short-term panic thinking that does nothing for the league in the long term. It's two schools. I think you can actually have a conversation about SMU. We don't have to, but I think you can. But I think Carol Stanford have two schools that it's very clear at this point have zero market value and the ACC keeps trying to talk to them, talk themselves into the fact that they're going to help them somehow.

And it's the old wire clip of Marla talking to the security guard. You want it to be one way, but it's the other way. And that's all this is ever going to be. The ACC keeps trying to talk itself into this. It just doesn't work. It just doesn't work.

And that's the long and the short of it. Does that mean they won't do it? No, these presidents could do anything. They could have Alaska Anchorage by the time they're done. I mean, these people did not have the best interests of college sports in mind. They don't have the best interests of the ACC in mind. Their only interest is how can we add $5 to our athletic revenue for next year? And when you make decisions like that, you're making decisions the same way the people who ran Toys R Us made decisions and private equity ran that company out of business. These people are running this league like private equity would run it. They're running it like Heath Freeman runs Alden, the company that squeezes the life out of newspapers, the former Duke football player who's busy ruining democracy.

And they're going to do the same thing to the ACC if you give them a chance. And look, I should say I've been really critical of Randy Woodson, especially his role in NCAA governance. He was on the NCAA board of directors that voted to extend Mark Emmons' contract, gave him a gazillion dollars, and then a year later fire him and take away the gazillion dollars, although he kept most of it. That's bad governance.

That's the kind of thing that's going to be taught in the business school case study. You had a president of the NCAA who led you down a legal path that nearly led to your obsolescence, and you rewarded him in the middle of that when it was clear it wasn't going well and then had to turn around and clean up your own mess. It's bad governance. So I've been very critical of the NC State chancellor for that and other things, but I think he's got this one right, and so does Kevin Duskowitz. This is not the best move for the ACC, and if NC State and UNC are the schools that help block this, they deserve credit for that because someone has to. I know you feel differently. I just disagree. I agree on principle that it is foolish to have Cal and Stanford and SMU, foolish to have any of them in the league because they don't add to your football inventory.

It is completely foolish. This is not the Jim Harbaugh, early David Shaw, Stanford. It is not any era of Cal football, although I can't wait for the documentary on the ACC network about the Cal-Stanford band on the field game because that will be epic, and John Elway will show up as an ACC legend. I've got four words for you. Aaron Rogers, ACC legend. That is fantastic. All of that. Jared Goff.

What a litany of ACC quarterbacks in the NFL. So I'm on board. You and I agree on how stupid it is, but the sad reality, and you're right because I agree with this, is that they're going to do it because in the short term, and when I say short term, I mean like the first five years. It is going to enable the league to funnel more money to the squeaky wheel, and that's Florida State, and Clemson will get their share, and North Carolina, and maybe NC State, and who knows, Louisville, the schools that perform well on TV, the schools that perform well on the field will realize more money from this, and ultimately because they're not going to take the, and I think the figures are going to end up being somewhere between 50 and 60 million dollars annually. They're not going to take that money and divide it by 14. They're going to take that money and weight it. Maybe they'll take the first 30 million and distribute it to the top, and then the rest will get divided. They'll probably take a fair amount of money and start chartering flights for field hockey, you know, women's and men's and men's lacrosse, whatever.

They'll make the travel easier. They'll probably redo, I mentioned this yesterday, you can, they have to, they have no way to get around that. Adam, remember, none of this money ever goes to the athletes, and they're going to fly commercial because some assistant, the athletic director, is going to get a raise. No, that's what's going to happen. I think the league will have to.

But here's the funny thing about that. Even that, Florida State, Miami, Clemson didn't get more money. No matter how you cook that formula, do you know who ends up getting the most money?

Like if you actually run the formulas and do it? It's Wake Forest and Duke. Florida State and Clemson have pushed for a system that doesn't reward them.

There's no way you can cook the books because you have to. Title IX gets involved here. There is no way you can cook the books where this works for Clemson and Florida State. And it's laughable that they think some performance reward system is going to help them. It ends up rewarding Wake Forest, which is the school they don't think should be getting any money at all.

It's the law of unintended consequences. And the more money you pump into this that isn't equally distributed, it's actually going to hurt those big schools that underperform. So no, you're right in the sense that there's a short-term bump here that can keep those schools happy.

Here's my argument then. Why stop there? Why not take any school that's willing to forego a distribution? Why not at App State? Why not at East Carolina? I mean, those schools bring as much of a football and television perspective as Cal and Stanford do. And why not add Tulsa? Why not add Alabama, Birmingham? No, they should add San Diego State, Oregon State, and Washington State. An absolute should, if you're going to add Cal and Stanford, just get the rest of the Pac-12 and the school that was about to join the Pac-12 and just have five schools that are based on the West Coast, as opposed to two.

It would make a lot more sense than anything that we are doing. And SMU, it could be a six-game road trip would be absolutely fantastic. If you added 10 teams, that's $250 million that you can spread around. You could just give it to Florida State and be done. If you add 20 teams, that's $500 million. That solves the revenue gap.

You just have to find 20 teams willing to forego a revenue distribution. Then in five years, when they want their money, everything falls apart because no one wants to buy a piece of that league because none of these schools matter. But the presidents now will all be gone. They're going to be in their beach houses, no mountain houses.

They don't care. What do you think everything's going to look like in five years anyway? At this point, I have no idea. I mean, I do think we'll get some sort of football breakaway, but I really don't know what that's going to look like. I think it's going to look like one big conference with a bunch of divisions and a boatload of money tied up into it.

And I think a lot of the other sports are just going to go back to being where we were. That's what I think is going to happen. I don't think you're 100% wrong. I mean, I don't think you're 100% right.

I think you're close. I do think as long as there are two television bidders, there will be two separate factions. So as long as Fox is still in the game, there'll be two supercomps. So what you said, but two of them, because Fox is going to want one and ESPN. Oh, just like the AFC and the NFC. AFC and the NFC have two separate contracts in the National Football League. It's just going to look like a bigger NFL is all it is.

It's going to be an NFL with like three times as many teams. And honestly, Adam, that was the ACC's big miss here. It should have reached out to the Pac-12 and said, let's do an NFC, AFC thing where we sell our television contracts together as a package. And that holds the Pac-12 together. That gives content that that was the play. The play was to buy basically buy the Pac-12 right with ESPN and say, we're going to buy you and we own half of this network. We're going to be a rights holder in the pack, like Jim Phillips and Jimmy Patara sitting down to make the Pac-12 football schedule. But that was the play. The play was that that helps the ACC that's a revenue generator. If Jack Swarbrick is so intent on helping Callan Stanford by having a conference, he won't join join.

That was the, that was the way to do it. Let's not get started about what Swarbrick said. We don't have enough time.

I, I look, I've been more. Hey, Carolina Panthers fans, Chris Lee and Dennis Cox here. We're excited to offer you all the inside information on your team with the newest member of the Capitol broadcasting podcast network Panthers playbook twice a week. We'll keep you updated on your Carolina Panthers.

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Start your free trial at body.com. That's B-O-D-I.com. Lineant on Notre Dame than I think most people have, right? I actually think the ACC gets plenty out of Notre Dame and I think the, I think the league probably gets a little bit more from Notre Dame than Notre Dame gets from the ACC. But when Swarbrick wouldn't admit that there is a document that says if they join a conference that it must be the ACC, at least until 2036, he didn't, he could have just paid that lip service net would have been fine, but he refused to say that. I could not believe it.

So disrespectful. Yeah, it was. Here's, here's the thing that killed me. And that obviously I read the a hundred percent. The other one was when he referred to the ACC as a place we have our Olympic sports, like hockey is in the big 10, right?

You know what? Your president wasn't co-chair of the big tens commissioner search committee, but father Jenkins was. So either you're in and that's, I think this is, we've reached a point with Notre Dame, whether you feel like it, like you do, or you feel about it, like I do, we've reached a point where it's time to fish or cut bait.

You're either in or you're out. If you want to help pick the commissioner, then your AD can't go on Dan Patrick and pretend you're not in the league. And if you don't, if you want to pretend you're not in the league, that's fine, but step back from ACC governance. You don't get to vote for Cal and Sanford to join a league you won't join.

That's preposterous. And of course their, their vote really is irrelevant because the numbers work out the same, but I understand your point. It doesn't bother me that they have a full vote, but if Notre Dame wasn't in the league, you still would need three, three of those four no votes. One of those four no votes would have to become a yes in order for it matters on other things, Adam, it mattered on the I'm moving to conference office. Yeah, I'm okay with where the conference doesn't need an office. Yeah. Well, I'm just, my point is there are times where that vote can be a swing boat.

I don't know why a 20% partner gets to have a say in these things. All right. Will North Carolina achieve underachieve or overachieve this year in football? Well, will Luke, I just made that up.

Will the cock is not a great name. No, I, I don't think it's ever possible for North Carolina football to overachieve because just the hype that's inevitably inevitably associated with that program because of Mac and the recruiting and this year, Drake May and before that Sam Howell, et cetera, et cetera. So I think overachieve is off the table.

The question, the question for me is then what would be achieve? And maybe, you know, this is going to be an interesting year. I think the two teams with the best chance to finish second in the ACC and play Clemson, who I think will win the league in the title game, are UNC and NC state. So maybe finishing second and beating NC state in the, in the finisher to get a spot back in Charlotte, maybe that is overachieving because I don't think anyone expects you and see to be back in the title game post divisions. But I do think that's out there for the target. So I think achieve is being in that conversation.

So if we get to, you know, November and the targets are in early November and the targets are not in that conversation, then I think that would be underachieve. But the thing about it with UNC is, and we've talked about this a lot. You've had this run of generational quarterbacks at some point, you got to close the deal with one of them. If you're ever going to have a great season, it's got to be with Sam Howell or Drake May or whoever.

So I think there's, there is some pressure to kind of get the job done and break through this year because it's going to be a lot of changes after this year. I mean, there's not, I mean, of course we didn't know Drake May was there. We knew he was good.

We knew he was a top prospect. We knew he'd turned out, you know, he'd left Alabama to come to UNC, but that does feel like there's a sort of now is the time moment for UNC. It's almost like NC state last year.

If not now, when? You're never going to have everything lined up for you like this. Then obviously, you know, the quarterback injuries kind of put the kibosh on that. So North Carolina's early season schedule playing South Carolina to open, then the App State game here, and then the University of Minnesota here, which frankly is not going to be an easy game. If they get through that and you have the trip to Pitt right after that, it does set up for them just to get to the end of the season, to get to the Clemson game and the NC State game both on the road. I mean, theoretically, they could be 10-0. I think it's more likely that they're 8-2 or 9-1.

Even with all that said, it's still a pretty good year. You're probably in the top 15 if you are 8-2, and you might be in the top 10 or even the top five if you're 9-1 heading to those last two games. Yeah, I think that's the conversation that UNC needs to be in. I mean, I think what you're describing is kind of where the targets need to be if you want to say they achieved. And then whatever happens against Clemson and State, that is what it is.

That's a tough finish. I do think it's interesting that everybody's in the same position this year that NC State has been in for most of these years, which is finishing second to Clemson this year is actually going to mean something. As opposed for NC State, where all those years finishing second to Clemson or for Wake, some of those years, the years that Wake didn't win it, finishing second to Clemson was pretty meaningless. Now it means something. I think there's going to be a little more maybe for those former Atlantic Division teams to play for at the end of the year, but also I think everybody's going to get a sense of that.

Can we keep up? And then maybe Clemson's not as good. This is all assuming that Clemson's going to be vintage Clemson as we've seen in the last couple years.

That isn't always the case. Talk to Roddy Jones yesterday. Roddy Jones thinks we're going to have a lot closer to vintage Clemson than we've had in the past. He thinks that wide receivers are going to be good.

I need to have it proven to me, but I also don't follow the ins and outs of recruiting. I just always assume they have super talent, but I have not seen it on the field now for three years. I think I saw enough from Antonio Williams last year to feel like he's legit. I think we know what Will Shipley is at this point.

I think they have a shot with their skilled players. I'm talking to Roddy down at kickoff. His other big prediction was his sleeper team's NC State, and I think there's some validity to that. It's an interesting dynamic for State Carolina. Obviously, we haven't talked about Duke. The problem for Duke is with that schedule, they could be 20% better as a football team and 30% worse in terms of their record. It could be more than that.

It's so hard. That's being generous, but they can take a huge step forward. The phrase best five and seven team in college football history could come out with this Duke team. I'm not kidding. It might. It might. You're not wrong.

They're legitimately good with an NFC East-type schedule. Luke Tkach at Luke Tkach here or on X and here as well. Appreciate your time, man. Have a good weekend. All right. You too, A.G. All right, man. What's up, everybody? Okay.

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