2024 ACC Kickoff Information BC Participants BC's ACC Network Schedule
July 22: Commissioner Jim Phillips, Florida State, Georgia Tech, SMU
July 23: California, Pittsburgh, Stanford, Virginia, Virginia Tech
July 24: Boston College, Duke, Louisvile, Miami, Wake Forest
July 25: Clemson, North Carolina, North Carolina State, Syracuse
Head Coach Bill O'Brien
Quarterback Thomas Castellanos
Defensive End Donovan Ezeiruaku
Center Drew Kendall
10:45 a.m. - O'Brien
12:45 p.m. - Press Conference (ACCNX)
1:15 p.m. - O'Brien
2:15 p.m.- Castellanos
2:35 p.m. - (SiriusXM ACC Radio)
3:30 p.m. - Ezeiruaku & Kendall
The offseason ahead of the 2024 college football season was as turbulent as a Hollywood movie script. Backroom and behind the scenes dealings resulted in the virtual end of one of the college landscape's most storied leagues while bigger leagues more prominently featured over the past several seasons swelled their ranks with all star franchises. Programs appeared scrambled as they searched for new homes, after which the dust settled with nearly every west coast program joining a new league centered around the opposite shoreline and a completely different time zone.
College football, in particular, felt relegated to conference rooms and legalese. Terms like grant-of-rights permeated the center ring of a circus that challenged programs far and wide. Fans and analysts worried openly about the future of the sport. Coaches were asked questions about rumors that had nothing to do with a base 4-3 defense or their latest nickel package.
None of this, of course, dealt with the transfer portal or the emergent name, image, and likeness landscape, but the start of college football media days finally pushed some of that conversation to the back burner. The transition to actual football began, and Monday afternoon brought the Atlantic Coast Conference back into a discussionary fold as the first season of the newly-minted 17-team football league arrived at the ACC Kickoff media event in North Carolina.
"We're thrilled to have Cal, SMU and Stanford join the ACC," said commissioner Jim Phillips during his press conference. "With our 18 world-class member institutions, the league's profile is only enhanced academically and athletically. Our football print is now national, spanning coast to coast. The ACC has a presence in each of the five most populated states in the country. No other Power Four conference is in more than two…As a leader in college sports, the ACC is well-positioned to positively affect and embrace future change. In a time of great change, what remains constant is the greatness of the ACC. National championships, prestigious academic institutions, tremendous student-athletes, and a remarkable future."
The 2024 season marks the 20th anniversary of the ACC's first steps into realignment, but it's easy to forget how radical and revolutionary change was once introduced by the initial additions of Miami and Virginia Tech to the nine-team league. Both were national powerhouses after sharing the Big East championship in some capacity across eight of the previous 10 seasons, but each brought logical geographic considerations to a league built around Tobacco Road, the Mid-Atlantic, and the greater Southeast region.
Extending the league into South Florida made sense given the Hurricanes' overall in-state rivalry with Florida State, and Virginia Tech's built-in companionship with Virginia offered a political victory for then-Governor Mark Warner. Miami was in the aftermath of two consecutive trips to the Bowl Championship Series national championship with a blowout win over Nebraska in the 2001 Rose Bowl, and its ascension replaced the Hokies, who had appeared in the 1999 national championship game when Michael Vick led them to a Sugar Bowl appearance against Florida State.
Adding each brand was a significant blow to the Big East, but boardroom dealings signified a major shift in how leagues viewed their regional alignment when the ACC's approach to its 12th team. The league needed one more to split into the two divisions necessary for a lucrative conference championship football game, to which Boston College successfully lobbied the league for an invitation after prevailing attitudes initially centered on Syracuse as a northern addition.
BC was, to an extent, a game-changer, and the Eagles broke the mold for the future of college realignment. Halcyon days of regional rivalries and geographic conferences were gone, replaced instead by national exposure in an emerging technological world. Leagues sought to gain footholds across their traditional grounds, and superconferences swelled to 14-team and 16-team membership ranks as the SEC, Pac-12 and Big Ten all gained more freight.
The Big East was the first casualty after its basketball and football members split. The two-division Big 12 followed as defections brought the league below 12 teams. Non-BCS teams jockeyed for an opportunity to play in the more lucrative vacuum atop college football, and additions from the football championship subdivision led those conferences to maintain membership while more powerful Division II teams began reclassifying to FCS to fill the voids created by defections.
A decade-plus of change led to this offseason's maelstrom within the Power Five, and this season now begins with four conferences swelling to national footprints. Texas and Oklahoma are in the Southeastern Conference. UCLA, Southern California, Oregon and Washington are in the Midwest-based Big Ten with New Jersey-based Rutgers, a former Big East school, and Penn State. Colorado returned to the Big 12 after it originally left the league for the Pac-12 at the start of the last decade and this time brought Arizona, Arizona State and Utah, its original realignment partner, with it. Brigham Young, Cincinnati, Houston and Central Florida were all added last year.
"We've had six months of disruption," Phillips said. "I think we've handled it incredibly well. So I think it's important for me to lead our group in particular, not only our staff but more importantly our schools, to compartmentalize the legal piece of what's happening and not let it distract us or take us away from what we're all trying to do, [which] is to provide great experiences for our student-athletes, teams, coaches., put the focus back on the fields and areas of competition."
The off-field conversation likely isn't ending any time soon, but Monday's press conference ended - albeit temporarily - the discussion about the league's future. Seventeen of the ACC's 18 member institutions contend for the single-division championship race that enters its second season this year while Notre Dame's independent agreement maintains a five-game slate against league opponents. A five-win bowl season included Boston College's Fenway Bowl victory over the same SMU squad now aligned with the ACC, and a November 16 rematch in Dallas, Texas offers a late-season, built-in storyline for a league program that's ultimately one of the more intriguing comeback stories in college football.
"It means a lot for our team, our players, to do it in a way we did," said SMU head coach Rhett Lashlee. "In the last five years, nobody was won more games in the state of Texas than SMU football. [We] won a conference championship [and] finished ranked last season. So we're coming in on a high note."
"It's unfortunate because when you go through expansion, you're not able to engage with necessarily student-athletes because it's such a high level," he explained. "It's at the board level. You can't get all kinds of opinions about it. But we were very clear with the three new schools about what would be the reaction, what would be the feeling. They're going to be coming to the East Coast more often than our student-athletes are going to have to go to the West Coast. They were very enthusiastic about it."
The 2024 Boston College football season starts with a Monday night, Labor Day match-up against Florida State, last year's ACC champion. The Eagles will appear at the ACC Kickoff event on Wednesday with head coach Bill O'Brien, Thomas Castellanos, Donovan Ezeiruaku and Drew Kendall all set to take questions and speak to amassed media members.
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