New ACC football schedule will include fewer annual rivalry games

The ACC just went through a complete re-working of its football schedule what with the (much-welcomed) demise of the division format; the end result was three permanent league rivals per school, with the others rotating through.

Now that Stanford, Cal, and SMU are coming on board, you can toss that format out the window. And what a one season of that format it was. Er, is. As David Teel of the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported this morning, an updated seven-year schedule rotation is on the dockett, and there are a lot of interesting details to be settled.

Given the ungainly size of this football monstrosity, the league is no longer going to bother with a set number of permanent partners for each school, which follows the Big Ten’s lead. Some schools will maintain several—State vs. Carolina isn’t going anywhere, nor apparently is the State-Wake matchup—while others might have none. It just how they’re going to have to make the whole thing work.

One scheduling constraint the league is working with: part of the agreement to add Cal/Stanford was that no current ACC member travel out west more than three times over the next seven years.