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Stanford, Cal grapple with the ACC scheduling puzzle: “We’re working on it daily”

Four weeks after Stanford and Cal secured a home in the ACC, the most confounding aspect of their move — the competition schedule for a bicoastal conference — remains many weeks, if not months, from resolution.

“This stuff isn’t covered in any AD 101 class,” Stanford athletic director Bernard Muir joked. “But we’re learning on the fly.”

The athletes will be doing plenty of that, too, as they manage schoolwork at 35,000 feet while schlepping to games on the East Coast.

In the aftermath of the realignment wave that decimated the Pac-12, the Cardinal and Bears face a unique challenge upon entering their new conference next summer.

UCLA, USC, Washington and Oregon will have each other in the expanded Big Ten, mitigating the frequency of cross-country travel, while the Four Corners schools (Colorado, Utah, Arizona and ASU) fit geographically within the Texas-based Big 12.

But Stanford and Cal are the only members of the ACC in the Mountain and Pacific Time Zones. Their road games will either be on the other end of the Bay Bridge or the other side of the country.

“Scheduling is the big piece,” Muir said recently in his first extensive public comments about the issue. “We’re working on it daily. We hope to have a lot of the details established this fall.”

Stanford and Cal have staff members dedicated to the process and are talking to each other regularly about options to streamline travel time and costs. (One example: sharing chartered flights.)

Athletic department officials are working with faculty members on the appropriate levels of academic support for athletes who will be spending more time on the road.

Members of Stanford’s sports performance department are consulting with counterparts at USC and UCLA on best practices for limiting the impact of air miles and time changes.

In Charlotte, ACC executives have been nose-deep in the issue since the first half of August, when the conference got serious about adding Stanford and Cal.

After all, the schedule affects the ACC’s current members, as well.

“There were countless hours of discussions about how we can schedule in the future,” ACC commissioner Jim Phillips said the day his conference added Stanford, Cal and SMU. “It was an amazing exercise. We want to eliminate as much of the burden on the student-athletes as we can. We have to be creative.”

One option under consideration is to stage neutral-site competitions on SMU’s campus or in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, thereby cutting travel for participants located on both coasts.

This much is certain: The travel burden won’t be shared equally.

Football is the prime driver of realignment but won’t be significantly impacted. Stanford and Cal will make three or four trips to the East Coast per season, each lasting a few days using chartered aircraft.

But there are only so many mitigation options available for many sports, particularly men’s and women’s basketball, softball and baseball and a few others.

How many teams will fly commercial? How many will compete on East Coast campuses on back-to-back weekends? And, crucially: To what degree can Stanford and Cal limit travel for non-conference games, given that they will be logging so many miles once league play begins?

It all appears daunting and feels contradictory to the academic mission of both schools. But the travel piece “wasn’t a non-starter” when Stanford first sought salvation in the ACC, according to Muir.

“First and foremost, we wanted the Pac-12 to stay intact,” he said. “It had served us well. Then when we realized it was falling apart, it was, ‘OK, what is the appropriate home?’

“We had talks with our student-athlete leadership group. They said three things: No. 1 was they wanted to compete at the highest level. No. 2 was what would the travel look like. And No. 3 was ‘Don’t forget about No. 1.’

“Once the ACC said yes, that was it.”

But the life raft came with a cost. With two costs, actually:

— Stanford and Cal agreed to a 12-year contract with the ACC — an eternity in the rapidly changing world of college sports.

“We had to talk about it,” Muir said. “But it does provide stability.”

— The Bay Area schools reportedly will receive reduced shares of the ACC’s media rights revenue for nine years, then transition to full-share membership for the final three years of the contract.

And it’s not like either is in great shape financially.

Cal’s athletic department relies on more than $20 million annually in support from central campus to balance its books, while Stanford recently planned to cut 11 sports before reversing course.

How does Muir plan to offset the revenue disparity? With help.

“Campus support is going to increase,” he said. “We know we can’t compete at the highest level and travel more without additional support. Campus and the board of trustees understand it’s too important to Stanford not to.”

Also, he plans to pitch Stanford’s donor base.

“(The contributions) will be value-adds,” he said. “We aren’t looking for help with the deficit. We need to invest.”

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Jon Wilner has been covering college sports for decades and is an AP top-25 football and basketball voter as well as a Heisman Trophy voter. He was named Beat Writer of the Year in 2013 by the Football Writers Association of America for his coverage of the Pac-12, won first place for feature writing in 2016 in the Associated Press Sports Editors writing contest and is a five-time APSE honoree.

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