How did the nation’s premier university – a college boasting the finest athletics program ever — wind up in that academic and athletic backwater known as the ACC?

It pains me to write what follows about Stanford University – a school that has done so much for me and means so much to me – but this is the painful truth:  Stanford has been through a period – and may still be in the middle of that period – of failed leadership with regard to its athletics program – a program that by any measure is – or was – the finest in the history of college sports.

For more than a century, Stanford was a member of the west coast athletics conferences which ultimately evolved into and grew to become the Pacific-12 Conference.  The Pac-12 Conference had an incredible history of success in intercollegiate sports and on the world stage at the Olympic Games.  The conference won far more college national (NCAA) championships and Olympic medals than any other conference, and Stanford athletes have won more NCAA team and individual championships and far more Olympic medals than the athletes of any other school – and in some cases more than entire conferences.  Only 14 countries have won more Olympic medals than Stanford athletes.  Stanford is the only school to have won national championships in football, baseball, men’s basketball, and women’s basketball.  Stanford is the holder of the greatest record in college sports:  It has won at least one NCAA championship every year for an unimaginable 48 years in a row — every year since 1976 – and in some years has won as many as six.  This is a record which will never be approached much less broken.

Stanford has accomplished these feats on the playing field while maintaining the highest admissions and academic standards.  It is universally regarded as among the top research universities in the world.  It’s faculty is peppered with Nobel Prize laureates.  The school and its graduates created Silicon Valley.  And it has produced a president, several supreme court justices, dozens of senators, and scores of congresspeople, as well as renown leaders – scores of them household names — in fields from science to business to entertainment.

So how has a school so accomplished and so packed with geniuses been crippled by a failure of imagination and leadership so shocking that Stanford is no longer a member of the most successful college athletics conference of all time, but instead now resides among the dregs of the ACC – the Atlantic Coast Conference?

As the Pac-12 Conference fell behind the B1G and SEC in revenues earned from football, it began to wobble as conference members USC and UCLA first pushed for larger shares of the Pac-12 Conference’s revenues, and then began to look for a new conference home which would pay them more.  As signs emerged that USC and UCLA might bolt, Stanford’s leadership did nothing to discourage USC and UCLA’s plans to move or to save the conference.  We became and remained passive throughout – acting as if this dissolution of the Pac-12 didn’t affect us or that things would somehow work themselves out without our involvement and leadership.  Not long after USC and UCLA announced their departures from the Pac-12, Colorado announced that it too would leave the Pac-12 – in its case for the Big 12.  Within 24 hours, five other Pac-12 Conference schools fled leaving the once proud Pac-12 as the desperate Pac-4.  And throughout this calamity Stanford’s leadership acted as spectators, not leaders.

After the Pac-12 imploded, Stanford was left with two choices.  Stick with the Pac-4 and rebuild the conference.  (The right choice)  Or go begging for a place in the Atlantic Coast Conference – a conference on the other side of the country with schools stretched along the – that’s right – Atlantic coast — and the very worst in all respects of the remaining Power Four conferences.  (The wrong choice)  Stanford’s leadership made the wrong choice.

What is a school like Stanford doing in a conference as awful as the ACC?

First, the athletic side:

Stanford fields teams in eleven different sports in which none of the other ACC member schools participate.  There is no ACC competition in men’s volleyball and water polo, or in women’s beach volleyball and water polo.  The ACC can’t accommodate eleven Stanford sports.  Why would we join such an impoverished conference?  While Stanford has won 134 NCAA championships across numerous sports, ACC members Pitt, Virginia Tech, and SMU have never won a championship in any sport.  Georgia Tech has won one, Louisville three.  What a pack of losers.

Now the academic side:

More importantly, the ACC is a conference of academic losers.  The Association of American Universities is an organization of America’s top research universities.  Stanford comes from the Pac-12 where all but two conference members were members of the Association of American Universities, and each time the conference expanded there was a great deal of discussion about whether the proposed new conference entrants measured up academically to the existing conference members.  (I can remember being personally opposed to the additions of Arizona and Arizona State because of academic concerns.)  More than half of the members of the ACC are not members of the Association of American Universities.  The conference includes such academic laggards as Florida State, Clemson, North Carolina State, Louisville, and SMU.  What are we doing consorting with these schools?

Since forever, Stanford’s men’s and women’s basketball teams have taken a hiatus during the first two weeks of December so that the players could prepare for and take end-of-fall-quarter exams.  This year, the ACC, showing it’s lack of concern about the education of conference athletes, scheduled conference games for both Stanford’s men’s and women’s basketball teams during exams.  This is not a conference with values aligned with those of Stanford.

There are cultural issues as well.  The members of the late Pac-12 respected one another, and there was a mutual affection across the conference.  In the ACC, the schools hate each other to the extent that you have to wonder why they ever formed a conference with each other in the first place.  Why would Stanford join such a dysfunctional family?

Supposedly, Stanford has moved to the ACC so as to one day in the future reap a share of the riches earned by the ACC schools’ football teams through television rights.  Stanford doesn’t need the money.  The school has a $40 billion endowment.  Besides, whatever money Stanford one day makes from playing ACC football will likely be spent on the many added costs of competing in a conference on the other side of the country.  Stanford is a school which has lost its way.