Inside ACC Network’s ambitious coast-to-coast Week 1 plan for ‘ACC Huddle’
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ACC Network’s flagship football studio show is about to traverse the entire American continent in a single Labor Day weekend, planting its flag on three campuses spanning two coasts across four days.
ACC Huddle, hosted by Taylor Tannebaum alongside analysts Jimbo Fisher, Eric Mac Lain, and Eddie Royal, will originate live from Stanford, Cal, and Florida State, following the same core crew from Friday’s No. 7 Miami-Stanford game through Monday’s matchup between No. 19 SMU and the Seminoles. Special guests along the way include Stanford GM Andrew Luck, ACC commissioner Jim Phillips, Bay Area rapper E-40 on Friday, and Cal GM Ron Rivera and Louisville coach Jeff Brohm on Saturday. Back in Bristol, hosts Kelsey Riggs Cuff and Matt Schick anchor surrounding coverage with analysts Steve Addazio, Nate Peterman, Mark Richt, and Bryce Love, filling in the gaps between the road stops.
The concept germinated from Miami’s improbable run to last year’s national championship game, according to ACC Network director of programming Jeramy Michiaels, who spoke with Awful Announcing ahead of the trip. Miami’s season-opening clash at Stanford struck Michiaels as the perfect symbolic launching pad for a conference that now stretches, quite literally, from coast to coast, and once ACC Huddle committed to covering it, one game turned into three.
“We went from covering one great game and realizing that we can also be at Cal the next day, and with the way the schedule played out, Florida State and SMU as a conference game on Monday night in an exclusive prime time window on ESPN,” Michiaels said. “We thought it would be a great idea that hopscotching the continent for three games in four days would be the right move to kick off the season.”
The decision required serious internal deliberation before receiving the green light, Michiaels said, with the network’s first question being whether the plan was even logistically feasible, given the dozens of essential personnel operating behind the scenes beyond the four faces viewers actually see on camera. The scheduling puzzle grew even more intricate once ACC Huddle also committed to covering the UVA-NC State game in Charlottesville during Week 0, a contest originally slated to be played in Brazil before being relocated stateside.
“The first question was to our production team: can we do this? Can we accomplish it?” Michiaels said. “And we didn’t take that decision lightly. We put a lot of thought into all of the moving pieces, because it’s not just the four talent that are going to be on the set, but it is dozens of other personnel who are also a part of every one of those shows.”
Alex Farmartino, ACC Network’s VP of production and a Virginia alum himself, was on-site for that Charlottesville broadcast, and standing on his own old campus grounds ahead of kickoff drove home exactly why the network bothers sending crews on the road in the first place.
“I think back to my college days and those football Saturdays; those were as good as any day you would have in and around a college and a university,” Farmartino said. “The tailgates, the coming together, watching a great moment in the stadium, and ultimately the reason, the rationale to spend this money to take these shows on the road is to give viewers at home a sense of, hey, what’s going on on the campus? How much energy is there?”
That same emphasis on presence over convenience shaped nearly every other decision behind the trip, including keeping the same four-person crew at all three stops. Michiaels said the network specifically wanted continuity, especially with the U.S. Air Force signing on as ACC Huddle‘s presenting sponsor this season.
“We have a lot invested in ACC Huddle, and it’s important for us to kind of keep that group together,” Michiaels said. “They’re our best representatives of all of ACC football.”
Farmartino noted that the logistics behind the weekend scale up and down depending on location. Monday’s Florida State show gets the network’s full resources, with a production truck on-site in Tallahassee handling the bulk of the broadcast, while graphics and tape integration are still routed through Bristol. Friday and Saturday’s stops at Stanford and Cal work differently, relying on TVU transmission technology to assemble more of the show remotely from Bristol with a smaller on-site footprint.
“It’s one of those things that being able to have scalability, where you have a lot of resources on-site — sometimes you have to be a little leaner and meaner, especially trying to do a show Friday night and Saturday morning,” he says. “Having the smaller footprint on-site is how you’re able to make that possible.”
This marks the first time ACC Huddle has entered a new season without a single lineup or format change since the show’s original 2019-20 run, Michiaels said, a continuity both he and Farmartino cited as the operational bedrock underpinning the crew’s confidence heading into an unusually grueling weekend. Farmartino, who assumed the production role a couple of years ago, said the guiding question behind that philosophical shift was whether ACC Huddle was genuinely showcasing the conference’s absolute best offerings, rather than remaining shackled to whatever games happened to air on ACC Network itself.
Last season delivered the first real proving ground for that new approach, with the Huddle crew traveling to Clemson-LSU and Miami-Florida State before following Miami’s entire College Football Playoff run through Texas A&M, the Cotton Bowl, the Fiesta Bowl and, ultimately, the National Championship game.
“Ultimately, the best TV comes from continuity and relationships from the people that are on camera and the people that are behind the scenes,” Farmartino said. “It’s a big deal for us, for the four of them that you see on camera, and for the lion’s share of the people behind the scenes, to be able to have that continuity and that experience with one another.”
Fisher’s return to Florida State last season for Miami week produced one of the show’s defining moments, according to Farmartino, when the FSU legend was visibly emotional on set surrounded by the campus crowd.
“He was literally brought to tears right at the top of the show,” Farmartino said. “It was one of the coolest moments we had of the season, and the reason that happened is because there was the crowd and they were cheering, and there’s the signs. College GameDay does that better than anybody, the way Pat McAfee works the crowd. The crowd is a character in the show. We’re certainly not College GameDay, but on ACC Huddle, we’re trying to capture that same energy.”
Tannebaum, an FSU alum herself, made much the same case when Awful Announcing asked what the network actually gains by physically embedding on campus rather than previewing games from the comfort of a home studio.
“Showing up is important in building trust. If you’re gonna talk the talk, you better walk the walk,” Tannebaum said. “The ACC is unique because it does quite literally span coast to coast, and this weekend gives us an opportunity no one else has to celebrate and showcase our entire footprint. When you’re on campus, there are firsthand accounts you can’t get in studio. For example, what the energy feels like at Cal and Stanford with two new, young head coaches leading the way. Or what No. 7 Miami actually looks like up close versus on television, which holds value for the analysts when talking about the team on set.”
Two years removed from Stanford, Cal and SMU joining a conference historically built around the Eastern Seaboard, Tannebaum said the geography has simply stopped feeling strange.
“Two years ago this seemed crazy, but SMU, Cal and Stanford have assimilated so well that it’s almost hard to remember what it was like without them,” Tannebaum says. “It doesn’t change the way we talk about the conference on air at all. Our goal as we take the show around the country is to continue to introduce the West Coast fans to the East Coast history, and vice versa.”
“Bringing them into our overall audience is incredibly important, just to build the brand of ACCN and expose the great schools that make up the entire ACC, new and old,” Michiaels adds.
That introduction doesn’t happen only during football season, either. Michiaels pointed to the network’s decision to move away from broadcasting traditional spring games, replacing them with hour-long shows produced by each of the conference’s 17 football programs, giving fans of every school, old and new, a behind-the-scenes look each spring before the Huddle crew shows up in person for preseason camp every August.
Getting three campuses right in four days comes down to a mountain of preparation, split between the host, the producers building each show’s rundown, and the analysts doing their own homework. Tannebaum said the process starts with breaking the trip into pieces rather than trying to hold all three shows in mind at once.
“Using true coach speak, you take it one game at a time. I’ll focus on the Friday night and Saturday morning shows first before fully turning my attention to SMU-FSU on Sunday,” Tannebaum said. “I’ve spent the early part of my week prepping every ACC game on the schedule individually with stats, nuggets, and quotes from press conferences in a giant Google Doc. My producers build great rundowns, and my job is to fill in the blanks with the prep I’ve gathered, and then rely on my analysts, who have done the prep work too. Truthfully, having fun is the common denominator regardless of where we are, and that’s the game plan all weekend.”
But having fun on camera is only possible because of everyone working to make sure there’s a broadcast to have fun on, which is why both Michiaels and Farmartino were careful to note that the weekend’s traveling crew deserves credit, but not all of it. Farmartino, who said he came up in an era of production trucks where an entire broadcast originated from a single physical location, singled out the Bristol-based staff stitching together the remote and on-site elements of the show as an equally indispensable, if less visible, pillar of the weekend’s execution.
“They are an equally vital part of this team,” Farmartino said. “The way that our staff kind of stitches those things together really is so impressive to me.”
ACC Huddle airs Friday at 8 p.m. ET ahead of Miami-Stanford, returns Saturday for UCLA-Cal coverage beginning at 10:30 p.m., continues Sunday around Louisville-Ole Miss on ABC, and closes Monday with a special one-hour edition at 6 p.m. from Florida State, followed by College Football Countdown coverage ahead of SMU-FSU kickoff.
“It is, to use a football term, kind of like a blitz to start the season,” Michiaels says. “It’s ambitious, but the ACC schedules ambitiously in that first week of the season.”
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