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Cal, Stanford and SMU to join ACC, giving Hurricanes new conference foes

The Miami Hurricanes are getting new conference foes, and they will have to travel a long way to play them.

The ACC schools’ presidents voted to add Cal, Stanford and SMU to the conference, according to multiple reports. The three-team expansion would take the conference to 17 full members with Notre Dame as a partial member.

The teams will join the ACC in 2024, according to multiple reports. They are the first additions to the league since Louisville joined in 2014.

Cal and Stanford join the conference from the remnants of the PAC-12, which began disintegrating with last year’s announcement that USC and UCLA were leaving to join the Big Ten. Oregon and Washington followed with the same announcement this year, and several other PAC-12 programs bolted for the Big 12.

With Cal and Stanford joining the ACC, the PAC-12 is left with only two members, Oregon State and Washington State, after this season.

SMU joins from the American Athletic Conference. The Big 12 raided that conference, with Cincinnati, UCF and Houston leaving the AAC this season.

Cal and Stanford will join as partial members, receiving a smaller share of media revenue, while SMU will receive no media revenue for at least seven years, The Athletic reported. The conference’s media deal with ESPN says it must pay a full pro-rata share for any new members, creating a larger pool of revenue for the ACC’s current members, according to The Athletic.

The ACC is not immune from defection rumors and threats. Florida State has threatened to leave the conference in the past several weeks, citing financial disparities between the Big 10 and SEC, which have more generous television deals, and the ACC.

However, the ACC has a grant of rights deal that binds the schools to the conference through 2036. Any school that leaves the conference would likely face steep financial costs.

“Florida State is doing what Florida State feels like it needs to do,” Miami athletic director Dan Radakovich told ESPN in August. “Each of our schools have to make their own decisions. But on top of all of it, we need to continue to try to make the ACC as strong as we can make it. We’ve got our grant of rights, we have all those other pieces that are associated with keeping ourselves together. Right now, we feel really strongly that our best course of action is to keep the ACC together and try to make it as strong as it can be.”