There is growing talk that perhaps the ACC, should it decide to attempt a conference-only schedule in the fall, will develop three pods of five teams each with home-and-home slates to count towards the league standings. Then the 10-game schedule could be filled out with a pair of crossover games, or perhaps some of the ACC teams keeping their regional, annual rivalry showdowns with SEC opponents.

Local sports radio host Joe Giglio was the first to report on the above idea.

Like all other solutions for the fall in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the concept is easier said than done. Presumably the goal would be to regionalize the ACC as much as possible for the sake of limiting travel. The league would also be able to bring Notre Dame into the mix under this scenario.

The crux of the problem is that six teams are located within North Carolina and Virginia. Ideally, you would prefer to partner the two Virginia-based institutions — Virginia and Virginia Tech — together, and to keep the four North Carolina-based universities — Duke, NC State, North Carolina and Wake Forest — in a group.

But geographically and mathematically, it becomes difficult to do given the wide footprint of the ACC. Miami is close to nobody, truthfully, in the league. In-state rival Florida State is still about a 7-hour drive from there. On the other side of the conference, Boston College is a manageable drive of under five hours to Syracuse, but beyond that, BC is not really close to anything either. For that matter, Syracuse’s only other halfway decent drive is to Pittsburgh.

That said, the northern-based schools can fit together nicely with an understanding that some matchups are going to have to be lengthy, air-based travels. It’s what to do with the other schools where it becomes more complicated:

Boston College

Louisville

Notre Dame

Pittsburgh

Syracuse

• Boston College will have to do a lot of flying to make a fall schedule work regardless, but this does preserve a potential long bus ride with the Orange for two games. Pittsburgh is actually within a 7-hour drive of all these schools outside of BC. Notre Dame and Louisville are close enough to each other for that to be a potential bus ride as well.

Five of:

Duke

NC State

North Carolina

Virginia

Virginia Tech

Wake Forest

• Here is where it gets complicated, and someone could very well get the short end of the stick (and maybe some leverage from the ACC on future considerations down the road). All of these schools are drivable distances from each other, but there’s only room for five of six.

One program would probably have to accept an assignment in the southern region of the league, which then provides for at least a couple pretty lengthy and expensive airplane flights.

Given that Virginia and Virginia Tech are further north, it’s probably safe that they will be together in this group, and that it will be one of the four North Carolina-based programs that gets split off.

On one hand, Wake Forest is closer, if you want to split hairs, to Clemson and Georgia Tech and basically the same drive to Florida State and Miami as the three Triangle-based schools. On the other hand, WFU is an hour closer to Virginia Tech.

NC State fans will also howl at the optics if UNC and Duke are safely in this division and it’s between them and Wake Forest to be shipped to the southern part of the conference. If assigned there, the Wolfpack’s closest drive would be Clemson, about 4 1/2 hours away, or almost the distance between BC and Syracuse.

The difference is BC does not have other options nearby, and NC State or whomever from the North Carolina-based schools would have five. One way to alleviate some of that is to add a pair of “crossover games” and potentially offer up the possibility that whichever team that would leave this group to go to the southern part has its pick of who it plays and gets both of them at home, if the league is going with 10 games.

There is also the possibility of making another team from another division bite the bullet and do the traveling, but that would potentially involve splitting the Virginia schools or making other programs do an extensively more amount of traveling at the expense of the four North Carolina programs, which would be an optics issue.

An example of that option could be to move the two Virginia-based teams to the northern part of the league and moving probably Louisville to the mid-Atlantic to team up with the four North Carolina-based programs, but that still does not solve the problem of needing a fifth team in the southern part of the ACC.

Clemson

Florida State

Georgia Tech

Miami

(plus one)

• This is geographically settled. Clemson and Georgia Tech are easy trips to each other, and GT and FSU are not that bad of a drive either. Clemson and FSU is a bit of a hike but not unbearable. Miami is an outlier geographically in the conference but there’s really no getting around that.

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