Stanford and Cal join the
ACC: The third
newcomer, SMU, could be
the key to reducing travel
demands on the West
Coast schools
The bicoastal conference plans to get creative with scheduling for Olympic sports
...
SMU joined the league on Friday, along with the Bay Area duo. The Dallas-based university not only brings a massive media market but a campus with workable geography for schools on both coasts.
...
One option under consideration: Turn SMU’s campus, or the Dallas-Fort Worth area in general, into a neutral-site hub for intra-conference matchups, meets and events.
Cal chancellor Carol Christ said:
“We’re working this hard. I don’t minimize the challenge it presents for athletes, but I also think there are things we can do to mitigate it.”
The Cardinal stated on its website that 22 of its 36 sports “will see either no scheduling changes or minimal scheduling impacts.”
Meanwhile, Christ said that 19 of Cal’s 30 teams ”will have their travel minimally or not at all affected” by the move into the ACC.
...golf, tennis, cross-country and rowing:
“Their patterns of travel essentially are going to be identical (to the current situation),’’ Christ added. “We have a few teams, like field hockey, that already travel to the East Coast. And I’m not worried about football,” which will play a few conference road games per year.
The teams most likely to be impacted are men’s and women’s basketball, baseball, softball and volleyball.
“We’ll be working really hard on that to see what we can do with joint travel with Stanford,” Christ said.
[That was another purported idea, "bundling" travel I think it was called.]
Cal athletic director Jim Knowlton noted that many Olympic sports teams already play non-conference games on the East Coast and explained that men’s soccer, for example, “will probably have two trips and play two games out east, and their non-conference schedule will be far more local.
“So the net travel (impact) they will experience is one additional trip east.”
I don't see that anybody else made the analogy to the airlines' hub-and-spoke system so I am claiming it as mine. Once it's in your head it's just so obvious. And where did Southwest Airlines start? Love Field. What city? DALLAS. Southwest flies bicoastal out of Dallas. American: bicoastal out of Dallas. Delta flies bicoastal out of Atlanta. FedEx? Where is FedEx headquartered? Memphis. They ship bicoastal out of Memphis. The hub-and-spoke system is familiar and is hardly new. Delta paradigmed it in 1955. It is the obvious solution to intranational transport and I'm glad I thought of it. As Jon Wilner says above, it is now clear that SMU was the key to making The Airplane Conference a reality. Duh.
*
*The proposed "Airplane Conference" (1959)
Although the term was not used at the time, perhaps the first superconference was the proposed "Airplane Conference" of 1959. Suggested by University of Pittsburgh Athletic Director Tom Hamilton, the proposed 12-team football conference would have stretched across the United States. It would have consisted of five former members of the Pacific Coast Conference (Washington, California, USC, UCLA and Stanford), the three largest service academies (Army, Navy, and Air Force), and four eastern universities (Notre Dame, Pitt, Penn State, Syracuse). The conference would, Sports Illustrated said, be the strongest in football in the country; as the schools were independent no conference schedule would be disrupted. The "Airplane Conference" failed to form after the service academies backed out because of the Pentagon's opposition to the idea.
Six of the schools proposed for the Airplane Conference in 1959 are joined at last in the ACC in 2024.
