Friends, distinguished guests and students of all GPAs, we are proud to announce the addition of Stanford, Cal and SMU to the ACC, which shall be known, henceforth, as the Arbitrary Conglomerate of Colleges. We welcome these storied institutions to our league and promise not to make them answer impossible trivia questions like “name all the teams in the ACC.” We couldn’t possibly do that ourselves without a cheat sheet.
Each of our new schools brings a special mix of academic excellence and sudden desperation, like a student who carries a four-point into his last semester and realizes he has never been to a party. Until recently, Stanford and Cal were proud members of the Pac-12, and SMU was a proud member of some other conference. Who can remember anymore? Then the Pac-12 imploded, leaving Stanford and Cal without a conference. We’re still not sure how SMU got in here, but never mind that. We didn’t have time to do background checks. What matters is that now they can all look forward to late-autumn trips to Wake Forest or Boston College, where they will take on another middling team of little interest for a chance to secure a spot in a third-tier bowl game for as long as third-tier bowl games exist. Dreams do come true.
We understand you have questions, like, “Is Stanford’s volleyball team really going to fly across the country to face Boston College on a Tuesday?” We have a simple answer to that: “Um … we guess so?” It does sound kind of expensive, but that’s O.K. We plan to bill the Big Ten and SEC for all travel costs, and also for any therapy not covered by insurance.
