Cal Family -

Greetings from Texas, where we are getting ready to kick off the 2023 football season!

I am excited to announce that we will be joining the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), beginning with the 2024-25 academic year. 

Chancellor Christ and I have been evaluating multiple courses of action since UCLA and USC announced last summer that they were leaving the Pac-12. The more we evaluated all of the vital criteria – level of competition, academic standards, our ability to continue to support our student-athletes so they can thrive, and the long-term stability of Cal Athletics – it became clear that the ACC was going to be a fantastic fit for us.

Membership in the ACC will allow our student-athletes to continue to compete for championships at the highest level of intercollegiate athletics; it will allow our coaches the ability to continue recruiting the best scholar-athletes in the world; and it will give us new, exciting rivals at home and away venues. So, too, does this agreement support the long-term stability of Cal Athletics. We are beginning a new era of excellence for the Golden Bears.

I am grateful for the partnership of UC President Michael Drake, Chancellor Christ, ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips, and a group of dedicated alumni who helped facilitate important conversations as we navigated the challenges and opportunities that were before us over this past year, and in recent weeks. 

The ACC is simply a fabulous landing spot for us, both in the short and long term. This was a decision made in support of a promising future consistent with the legacy and values of our program's present and past. This was about moving to where conference alignment is heading - not only where it is right now. Throughout this process we paid close attention to what we were hearing and learning from our student-athletes, coaches, alumni, administrators, and fans. And, even though perspectives varied—as they always do in the wonderful Cal community—there was a clear consensus in favor of joining the ACC. We were determined to deliver what was so clearly desired.

While I am certain this is the best possible outcome we could have secured, there are certainly challenges we will need to address. The student-athlete experience is at the core of all we do. Nineteen of our 30 sports (two-thirds of our student-athletes) will see insignificant impact or no impact at all on their travel requirements because they either play in sports that weren't sponsored by the Pac-12 or their schedules already required similar national travel. We are already working on how to minimize the impact on the other sports - among the options we are evaluating are scheduling more non-conference competitions closer to home since our new conference schedule will take us to the East Coast more regularly; creating multi-team events at locations that reduce travel, and using charter flights – all with the student-athlete experience, including getting an excellent Berkeley education, in mind.

We will be joining the ACC as full members and have agreed to return a portion of our media rights revenue to the conference in support of its long-term strength. While I am confident that the financial terms are the best we could have secured, we recognize that this agreement may create budgetary challenges for our university. I will be engaging members of the campus and Cal Athletics administration in a collaborative process as we examine the impacts, weigh options for the future, and take the steps necessary to maintain the strength of the university's financial foundations as well as the essential role intercollegiate athletics plays on our campus.

The ACC has a long history of athletic success and features some of the top academic institutions in the country. No conference has won more NCAA championships over the past two years than the ACC. The ACC has also been the leader among Power 5 conferences in the US News & World Report rankings of "Best Colleges" for 16 consecutive years. With Cal and Stanford joining the ACC, the conference now features nine institutions that are members of the prestigious Association of American Universities.

And now for an ACC primer! Here are the teams we will be facing off against beginning next August: Boston College, Clemson, Duke, Florida State, Georgia Tech, Louisville, Miami, North Carolina, North Carolina State, Notre Dame, Pittsburgh, Southern Methodist, Stanford, Syracuse, Virginia, Virginia Tech, Wake Forest.  
As that list shows, there are some national powerhouses in the ACC with rich traditions. Clemson, Florida State, Miami and other top-tier football programs will make their way to California Memorial Stadium.  You will get to see the Bears compete against top men's basketball programs like North Carolina and Syracuse in Haas Pavilion, or maybe you'll make a road trip to watch the Bears play in Duke's legendary Cameron Indoor Stadium. 

While we will be working hard planning our transition to the ACC in August 2024, we still have one full year left in the Pac-12. Our fall sports are already in action, and I'm looking forward to a memorable final chapter of this story before we begin to carve out a new one.

For more than 150 years, Cal Athletics has strengthened and sustained the ties that bind us together as a community dedicated to athletic and academic excellence, to all that the Blue and Gold represents. And with the ACC agreement in place, we are looking to the future with high hopes and great expectations. We will do everything in our power so that, together, we can secure a great future for our student-athletes, our program, and our university. Never before has the rallying cry of "Fight for California" had more resonance or significance. 

Go Bears!


 
Jim