The Atlantic Coast Conference has unveiled a new scheduling model to incorporate new members California, Stanford and SMU for next year, which includes those schools facing each other as annual opponents while staying with a no-division format.
The league announced its reworked scheduling plan Monday evening, which has all 17 football-playing members playing each other at least twice over a seven-season stretch through 2030. The model also protects 16 annual matchups, including multiple long-standing league matchups such as Florida State-Clemson or North Carolina-Duke.
The move comes after the ACC voted in early September to add Stanford and Cal from the Pac-12, and SMU from the American Athletic Conference next year. The move pushed the league to 18 members in most sports, with Notre Dame remaining a football independent.
Yet the league faced new challenges by growing out of its eastern-seaboard footprint to reach across the country — with a stop in Texas in between — and create more extensive travel demands and more headaches for preserving regional rivalries.
The ACC last announced a change to its scheduling model in June 2022, a plan that included the elimination of the two-division format for a single division-free chase for the two spots in the ACC championship game.
That “3-5-5” model went into effect this season, which gave each ACC football member three permanent scheduling partners to play each year. Teams would then face the other 10 teams once every two years; five one year, five the next. It meant every ACC team will play all conference opponents home and away at least once every four years.
That represented a significant departure from the previous scheduling rotation that often had cross-divisional matchups going dormant for years, such as nearby neighbors Duke and North Carolina State meeting this year in Durham for the first time since 2013.
But the westward expansion made the 3-5-5 plan outdated before the first full weekend of play this season.
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