End of an era: Cal officially welcomed to ACC, as Pac-12 Networks shuts down

The California Golden Bears will join as a member with full voting rights of the Atlantic Coast Conference on August 1.

As of midnight, Eastern time, Cal has received its official welcome from the ACC.

However, they are not quite official members of the ACC yet!

Here is the official invite from the ACC to Cal, Stanford and SMU.

The Atlantic Coast Conference continues to ACCOMPLISH GREATNESS with the addition of three world-class institutions in the University of California, Berkeley (Cal), Southern Methodist University (SMU) and Stanford University as full members with full voting participation. All three institutions will begin conference competition this fall.
 
The additions of Cal, SMU and Stanford enhance and strengthen the ACC academically, athletically and financially as well as create a true national conference that spans coast to coast. The incoming universities enrich the league’s competitiveness in all sports and further demonstrate the ACC’s commitment to broad-based programs for both women and men. More than 2,200 student-athletes from Cal, SMU and Stanford will join the nearly 10,000 current ACC student-athletes competing at the highest level of intercollegiate athletics.

Another official transition: The Pac-12 Network itself is no more. The supposed media trailblazer of the Conference of Champions officially shut down operations on Sunday night.

Friend of the site, and Pac-12 Network host Ashley Adamson penned a last tribute to the conference channel she had worked for since its launch. A snippet of it is below.

I can tell you the weight of a beloved, 108-year-old conference imploding on our watch is something that will be with me forever. I will always be devastated by the unfulfilled potential of the Pac-12 Network. And yet, that doesn’t take away from the immeasurable pride I feel to have been a very small part of it.

…

In one of my last conversations with the late Bill Walton, he told me the Pac-12 Network saved his life. His spine had failed, he had been fired from every broadcasting job. 

“I had spent four and a half years on the floor. Everything was dark. I had no reason to hope anything would be different. And then out of the blue, Larry Scott calls me and said, ‘Bill, we have an idea.’” 

That idea — a television network that officially goes dark on Sunday — gave so many of us who worked there real purpose, joy, and a community that will live on forever. 

So as sad as it feels to say goodbye, I know it’s just a reminder that the time we spent together really meant something.

Although they have been removed from the Pac-12 site, Cal is still technically a member of the Pac-12 for one more month, when the Pac-12’s Grant of Rights officially expires on August 1. Cal and Stanford will join the ACC on August 2nd. SMU officially joined this morning.

The Pac-12 itself goes on with Oregon State and Washington State. Although we remain conference members for another month, nearly all mentions of Cal have been scrubbed from the Pac-12 website. There is one mention about Cal being one of the founding members in the Pac-12 history section.

So we will be in somewhat of a purgatory the next month or so.

I’ve shared my thoughts on the death of the Pac-12 and the Pac-12 Network a few times, particularly on how it could’ve been avoided and on why it actually happened. So I’ll keep this brief:

In theory, the Pac-12 gave us the utopia of what any member of a major athletic institution should want—the ability to see almost every game possible from nearly every sport. Had it worked, it could’ve set a standard that every other conference might have copycatted, but the Pac-12 would’ve had the leg up if their leadership had not just paused on all its progress in the early 2010s.

In execution, its hubris from its leadership (both from the conference and the university leaders) doomed it. There was not enough distribution of the channel, not enough partnership with the major TV carriers of college football, not enough interest from presidents to see the warning signs that things were going awry, and not enough adaptation to the landscape that the conference is. All these factors added up and eventually eroded trust and faith that the Pac-12 could accomplish its long-term mission.

So, it’s gone. And Cal is in the ACC.

Well, almost.