Look: 2024 ACC Schedule Reveal Like Something Out of a Bad Dream
The 2023 college football season has been over for a little more than two weeks, but 2024 schedules are out, or soon to be released, giving fans all the content they need to look ahead toward the future.
Next season is set to be one of the biggest that the sport has seen in some time, with the most impactful wave of conference realignment that we’ve ever seen becoming a reality.
The Pac-12 will be absorbed by three of the other four “Power” conferences, pitting teams on the West Coast against teams on the East Coast in league play (a concept that the author still can’t come to terms with).
On Wednesday, the ACC released its new-look schedule with SMU, Cal, and Stanford now a part of a 17-team league, and it still doesn’t feel like something that’s going to actually happen later this year.
Imagine telling Stanford’s athletic director, “Hey, so… your football team is going to be on the road in three out of four weeks from September 21 to October 12.”
“Okay,” they say, in this totally hypothetical conversation. “So, what’s the issue? That’s not totally unreasonable.”
“Well, the catch is, your shortest road trip in that span will be to South Bend, Indiana, which is a little over 2,200 miles away.”
*Phone call disconnects*
Stanford will take a cross-country trek three times in the course of four weeks to Syracuse (2,827 miles, 41-hour drive), Clemson (2,582, 38-hour drive), and Notre Dame (2,242 miles, 34-hour drive), and two of those games will be conference games. How does that even make sense?
Meanwhile, SMU will play a road conference game in California (at Stanford) on October 19, in North Carolina (at Duke) on October 26, and then come back home to Dallas, Texas, to play Pitt on November 2. This is not what college football was supposed to look like, guys.
The conversations about travel issues and player safety are coming, and at some point, maybe, we’ll see geography become important again. But for now, just buckle in and prepare for minimal travel from opposing fan bases in conference play, because I sure as hell don’t know many people willing to road trip 41 hours to watch Stanford and Syracuse play a football game.
