ACC's new kids on the block: How SMU, Cal and Stanford are looking to fit in (2024)

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Ashton Daniels took on the challenge of naming all 17 ACC teams with some level of confidence.

After all, Stanford’s starting quarterback is from Georgia.

“We’ll go with the three new ones: Stanford, Cal, SMU,” he said. “We’ll go with Virginia and Virginia Tech. North Carolina, NC State and Duke. Let’s see. Georgia Tech. Miami. Clemson. Oh, who else is in there? Pittsburgh.

“Five more? I’m stumped right now. It’s not easy at all. I’ve got nothing.”

A cameraman and reporter helped him fill in the blanks: Louisville, Wake Forest, Syracuse, Boston College and defending conference champion Florida State.

Daniels was the winner of this little exercise. His teammate, star receiver Elic Ayomanor, who is from Canada, named only nine ACC schools.

If we’re being fair, it might be hard for most of the general public to name all 17 ACC schools. Not only because the league has expanded from coast to coast, but also because in large part, it has been kind of invisible in the national championship race since Clemson began slipping a few years ago.

“I’m from the East Coast. The two big conferences I grew up watching were the SEC and ACC,” Daniels said. “I’ve always been familiar with the greats from the ACC, watched all the crazy Clemson games when Deshaun Watson was there. He’s a Georgia guy so I followed him. But it is new for us, especially the West Coast guys on our team. It’s gonna be a whole new experience for them. Heat is different. Humidity is different. The college atmosphere is gonna be different. But that’s something we’re all looking forward to.”

The truth is the transition to the ACC for Cal, Stanford and SMU is different for all three.

SMU is making the jump in weight class to the Power 4. SMU is logging 6,583 travel miles this season with two trips to the West Coast and three to the East Coast — fifth most in the league behind the two California and Florida schools. The Mustangs are the most prepared of the newcomers to win right away after going 11-3, winning the American Athletic Conference crown and finishing 24th in the final College Football Playoff rankings last season.

Stanford and Cal, meanwhile, were abandoned in the breakup of the Pac-12. There’s a sense of sadness mixed with the bizarro world of playing games on the East Coast.

“It’s definitely hitting home now,” sixth-year Stanford linebacker Tristan Sinclair, a California native, said as he sat and looked at the ACC poster placed behind him. “I felt kind of weird about it. I’m excited about playing in the ACC, but I’m sad the Pac-12 died.”

Cal quarterback Fernando Mendoza, a Miami native, never imagined he would be playing in the ACC when he left for Berkeley. He thought for sure Cal would end up in the Big Ten or Big 12. In the end, he and most of his teammates were just happy they didn’t end up being left behind like Oregon State and Washington State.

“Really, we jumped on the last train,” Mendoza said.

Cal will travel more than anybody (12,014 miles) in the league with five trips across time zones, including four to the East Coast. Coach Justin Wilcox is entering his ninth season at Cal, which makes him the fifth-longest tenured coach in the league behind Clemson’s Dabo Swinney, NC State’s Dave Doeren, Wake Forest’s Dave Clawson and Pittsburgh’s Pat Narduzzi.

Sixty-three players on Cal’s roster call the Golden State home — including star running back Jaydn Ott, who is ecstatic he’ll have more East Coast fans being able to tune in and watch him play.

Stanford is coming off a 3-9 season and doesn’t use the transfer portal very often. The roster has 31 players from California but is littered with representatives from up and down the Southeast and East Coast. The Cardinal will travel to the East Coast four times this season and will trek 10,532 miles for six road games.

Neither Cardinal coach Troy Taylor nor Wilcox is worried about the travel aspect the teams will face. Both said their schools will leave town an extra day earlier than they usually do for road games and make up for the hours lost on the flights back.

“Take the biggest plane Delta makes, take water, Gatorade, get them up and stretch a little bit,” Wilcox said. “You land, do your Friday routine, play the game and pick up three hours going home. Yes, it’s a long trip. But it’s not a big deal.”

SMU eager to win now

Rhett Lashlee doesn’t have much in the way of patience. He always wants to go faster. The way he calls his offense, SMU’s coach said he often will start signaling in the next play to his quarterback before the previous play is over and the ball is set.

So, it’s understandable how Lashlee doesn’t have much in the way of patience for growing pains as the Mustangs make the jump into a power conference. He wants to win right away.

Can they? He’s not sure. But he’s eager to find out.

Louisville, the last team to join the ACC before SMU, Stanford and Cal did this summer, went 9-4 in its first season in the league in 2014 coming off a 12-1 season and a second-place finish in the AAC.

Those 2014 Cardinals, however, had a new coach and a new quarterback as they made the transition. SMU will not. The Mustangs also face the league’s easiest schedule with only five bowl qualifiers from a year ago on the slate in Florida State, Louisville, Duke, Boston College and California.

Louisville hasn’t won an ACC title in its 10 years in the league but did finally break through and make it to the conference title game last season.

“There’s a learning curve, and we’re gonna figure out where we stand,” Lashlee said. “But I do think we got a team that can compete, and I do think if we can have some success, the recruiting could happen faster for us just because of our proximity in Dallas.”

Lashlee is interested in establishing sustained success for the Mustangs, and to do that SMU has to recruit differently. He prefers to look at the Kyle Whittingham model at Utah as the right blueprint.

The Utes went 8-5 in their first season in the Pac-12 in 2011 before having back-to-back 5-7 seasons before they broke through with a nine-win season in 2014 and established themselves as one of the best and most physical teams in the league.

Lashlee, who cut his teeth as Gus Malzahn’s offensive coordinator at Auburn and Manny Diaz’s at Miami, is well aware his team will face a notable difference in talent and depth in this new league week to week, particularly on the offensive and defensive lines. It’s why the Mustangs went out and signed 14 linemen among their 20 portal additions this offseason.

There are five new faces on offense and nine on defense. It’s a mixture of former blue-chip recruits like Andrew Chamblee, who started eight games at tackle in two seasons at Arkansas, and defensive veterans like Jared Harrison-Hunte and Jahfari Harvey, who started 41 games combined in their first five seasons at Miami.

“It’s not just depth,” Lashlee said. “It’s quality depth.”

From a league-wide talent perspective, SMU is already tied with Louisville for having the fifth-most former high school blue-chippers (22) behind Clemson (51), Florida State (43), Miami (39) and North Carolina (30).

Of the 17 blue-chippers on offense, all but three (quarterback Preston Stone, tight end RJ Maryland and freshman running back Derrick McFall) arrived via the transfer portal. All five ex-blue-chippers on defense were plucked out of the portal.

Lashlee doesn’t believe that’s necessarily sustainable for the long term, and it’s an encouraging sign the Mustangs are recruiting at a much better clip at the high school level. SMU’s 2025 recruiting class ranks 20th with four blue-chippers among the 20 pledges.

He’s expecting more wins in recruiting as SMU wins on the field in the ACC.

“We’ve never had a top-25 class. I don’t know if we’ve ever had a top-50 recruiting class,” Lashlee said. “Who knows where it ends. But I think that alone without playing a game shows you the bump being in this league is gonna give us. If we have some success, it’ll only increase that.”

SMU prepared for the jump in competition by beefing up its recruiting and personnel department. Lashlee hired J.R. Sandlin from Oklahoma to be the Mustangs’ general manager of player personnel in February. Lashlee’s recruiting/personnel department from when he was hired in December 2021 has nearly doubled (from 23 to 40 staffers).

By comparison, Wilcox said his recruiting/personnel staff is not nearly that big, and Taylor said he has six people in his recruiting department.

“We really have a recruiting wing and a scouting wing — you’ve got to do both at a high level,” Lashlee said. “One is your identification and scouting, and the other is your front porch, your marketing, recruiting and capturing them. It was already a big endeavor that was already getting massively bigger. Going to the ACC, it is even bigger for us.”

Are the newbies prepared?

How much advanced scouting is needed when schools join a new conference? Not as much as fans might think.

“Over the offseason, we started looking at the first four ACC teams we play,” Taylor said. “But so much can change year to year. Different coordinators. Teams can change philosophy a little bit. So you don’t get too much into the weeds because you’re gonna have fresh game tape. You just want to familiarize yourself with what they do.”

Unlike his defensive coordinator, Scott Symons, Lashlee said he hasn’t done any himself on opposing defenses in the ACC heading into the season. He’s focused on the opener against Nevada. But Lashlee does have the advantage of previously coaching in the ACC for two seasons with Miami.

SMU opens the season Aug. 24 at Nevada. The Mustangs open ACC play last of the three new programs Sept. 28 at home against Florida State. Stanford opens with TCU on Aug. 30 and plays its first ACC game Sept. 20 at Syracuse.

Cal opens at home against UC Davis on Aug. 31 and plays its first ACC game Sept. 21 in Tallahassee.

“I’m not good at focusing on five different things,” Lashlee said. “We have some young coaches that have broken down people ahead of time. But even standard, the first or four games is all you need to look at because by the time you get to Week 4 and 5 you’ve got more current games you’re gonna look at anyways. Just like you can overtrain, you can overlook it. Sometimes, your first thought is your best thought.”

(Top photo of Rhett Lashlee: Jim Dedmon / USA Today)

Manny Navarro has been the University of Miami beat writer for The Athletic since September 2018. He's also the host of the "Wide Right" podcast. Manny's career started at The Miami Herald in October 1995 when he was a high school senior. He covered the Hurricanes, Heat, Marlins and high school sports for 23 years at the paper. He makes occasional appearances on WSVN's Sports Xtra on Sunday nights and is on the "Big O Show" with Orlando Alzugaray at 12:30 p.m. Tuesdays and Fridays. Follow Manny on Twitter @Manny_Navarro