In advance of the 2024-25 season, the ACC has released their schedule pairings for men’s basketball, which will be an inaugural 20-game slate. Stanford will face Cal, SMU, and Wake Forest both home and away. Stanford, Cal, and SMU are partnered together as a continuous pairing to help reduce travel. One other school not a part of the pairing had to also play Stanford both home and away. Wake Forest was the school that got that honor.
The remaining 14 games will be seven home games and seven road games, with Stanford only seeing a school once.
The following are schools that Stanford will only face at home: Boston College, Florida State, Miami, NC State, Syracuse, Virginia and Virginia Tech.
The following are schools that Stanford will face only on the road: Clemson, Duke, Georgia Tech, Louisville, North Carolina, Notre Dame and Pittsburgh.
Since they are operating as a travel partner with Stanford, Cal will have the same home and away opponents aside from one difference: Cal will face NC State twice and only see Wake Forest at home. Aside from that, it’s the same.
It’s obviously weird to think about Stanford and Cal playing in the ACC, but this is real life. It is what it is. As far as how hard of a schedule this is, it’s not an easy schedule by any means, but given that only Duke and North Carolina are finished in the AP Top 25 from the ACC, it might not be as hard as some fear. The Pac-12 also had just two teams in the AP Top 25 in Arizona and Washington State. So, the two leagues are actually pretty comparable in that sense. The one obvious difference of course is the fact that the Pac-12 has disbanded.
The most challenging part of this schedule in truth will be the travel. Stanford and Cal have to hope that the league has a good plan in place to make the travel as least burdensome as possible. One obvious way to do that is to minimize the amount of flights they have to take on one trip. For example, having Duke and North Carolina part of the same week would make a lot of sense. They could even perhaps knock out three games in a one trip. Stuff like that. Knowing the schedule pairings doesn’t offer us much insight into how that will be done, so that’s something we can eagerly await to see. It’ll be fun to see how that part shakes out and of course how life in the ACC goes for both Stanford and Cal as they begin this new era together.
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