NC State may pay for its expansion vote this week, but Cal brings something new to ACC

If N.C. State makes the long trip to California and comes back clinging desperately to very thin hopes of bowl eligibility, mired in the ACC cellar, the Wolfpack has only itself to blame.

If it weren’t for N.C. State switching its position to cast the deciding vote last year, the ACC would have remained at 15 teams instead of adding Cal, Stanford and Southern Methodist.

And in Year 1 of that new arrangement, the Wolfpack got stuck with a cross-country trip to Berkeley at a precipitous juncture in its own season to play a Cal team that’s not only been surprisingly competitive, but brought along a surprisingly entertaining fan base. The difference between 4-4 and 3-5, with a trip to Georgia Tech still on the schedule, is massive — not to mention the opportunity to take sole possession of dead last in the ACC at 0-4.

East Coast FBS teams going to the West Coast this fall have gone 6-10 before their red-eyes back home, a sample size that does a decent enough job of accounting for competition. Cal and Stanford account for three of the West Coast home losses, so the ACC hasn’t suffered as much to this point as, say, the Big 10 for bleeding across time zones.

Still: Reap, sow, etc.

And even if the ACC may yet come to regret picking through the Pac-12’s leftovers to become a copy-cat bloated coast-to-coast conference, even if athletes may come to hate it, at least there’s been one positive outcome no one saw coming: The Calgorithm.

For those who aren’t Terminally Online, the clever work of Cal fans to stoke the online discourse on TikTok and the Social Media Site Formerly Known as Twitter has been the biggest tangible benefit so far, flooding the zone with amusing riffs on Cal’s reputation as a bastion of leftist politics (“You just lost to the Woke Agenda” after winning at Auburn) and how many of its opponents are … not. The trip to Tallahassee’s “Woke Campbell Stadium” in the capital of far-right Florida was particularly ripe for humor.

(The Calgorithm folks have clearly pulled their punches this week out of appreciation for N.C. State’s vote of confidence that saved them from power-conference oblivion.)

Cal and Stanford are probably going to drag down the ACC in basketball, and nobody can stop that now, but Cal’s fans have unquestionably claimed the ACC’s meme title. More than that, they’ve brought something back to ACC football that’s been missing for a while: Pure enjoyment.

At a time when Florida State and Clemson are suing the league and expansion carved a deeper rift between the schools that would be desirable elsewhere and those that will sink or swim with the ACC, when the ACC’s future is constantly debated, the sheer online joy of Cal fans as they poke fun at their newfound opponents has been a ray of sunlight.

College football in the Triangle is an annual exercise in miserablism, but it’s spreading. Disgruntlement is everywhere. Florida State fans who thought they were too good for the ACC are lamenting their comeuppance. Clemson’s not what it once was, nor is Virginia Tech. College football in the ACC these days is suffered, not enjoyed. The latter is reserved for basketball.

But Cal’s fans and their AI-generated memes and self-referential humor are having a blast with all of it on their first time through the league, and their willingness to not take themselves — or ACC football — too seriously is an injection of levity someone should have prescribed for the ACC long ago.

If SMU felt like the school most likely to make a smooth transition to the ACC the way Virginia Tech did once upon a time, maybe Cal was actually what the ACC needed, a school just happy to come along for the ride with fans who enjoy football for what it is, unencumbered by unrealistic expectations or fading memories of past glory.

So at least one good thing came out of N.C. State chancellor Randy Woodson’s don’t-call-it-a-flip-flop flip-flop, even if the timing for the Wolfpack on the field isn’t great — and just as long as Cal doesn’t screw up everyone’s NET come basketball season.

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