if one takes with Phillips said literally, it provides valuable insights into the future schedule.
Football traveling East to West will be once every other year for our current 14 members schools, and so once every two years is how football will work out [for those 14 schools].
If this is true, it implies the 2–7-7 model has been adopted. The two rivals for the newbies are the other newbies.
So all ACC schools play a rival at home each year and a rival on the road. And the other 7 conferences games are against pool A or pool B of ACC schools. Both pools have 7 members and the members will be slightly different depending on the rivals a given school has.
We know that Cal will be in one pool of 8 and Stanford in the other pool.
They will probably try to balance the pools to put a Florida school in each pool.
They will probably take to balance schedules by putting Clemson and FSU in different pools (though they will likely be rivals to help with TV ratings.
If all this is true, I would assume BC, SU and Pitt would be paired together so that the two rivals for each are the other two. So SU would get BC and Pitt. Very similar to Stanford, Cal and SMU.
Here is how the pools might look for Syracuse:
Pool A
Clemson
Georgia Tech
Miami
Duke
Wake Forest
Virginia
Stanford
Pool B
Florida State
NC State
UNC
Louisville
Virginia Tech
SMU
California
(plus BC & Pitt)
The pools for Pitt and BC would look the same as they do for SU.
To get the pools for another school, replace Syracuse with the school and replace the school’s rivals with SU’s rivals.
So Stanford would look like this:
Pool A
Clemson
Georgia Tech
Miami
Duke
Wake Forest
Virginia
Syracuse
Pool B
Florida State
NC State
UNC
Louisville
Virginia Tech
BC
Pitt
(plus Cal & SMU)
When Phillips says the California teams will have 3 or 4 east coast away games for football each year, this is because they will always have 4 home games. Every other year, they play the other California team at home. In those years, there are 3 east coast road trips. The other year, where they play at SMU, there are 4 ’east coast’ road trips, where SMU is considered an east coast roadie.
It will be tough to get down to 2 rivals for some schools. It will really be tough to bump up to 9 conference games for the ACC schools that play an SEC school on Thanksgiving weekend. You can see more reasons why Clemson and FSU were against this. UNC apparently voted no because that is their thing. (Rolls eyes).
From SU’s perspective, I think they would like to play a team from Florida every year, they want to play their rivals every year and they want to retain Miami at home for 2024 because this is a game fans have waited decades for. If they can split BC and Pitt so we always have one at home, that would be really nice too.
