Paris Olympics 2024: The ACC tries to claim Katie Ledecky ... who never swam in the ACC

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Not even the Paris Olympics can escape the awkwardness of conference realignment in American college sports.

The Pac-12 once had many schools and styled itself as the "Conference of Champions" because those schools regularly produced champions across the NCAA's collection of sports, not just football and basketball. That made the conference particularly adept at producing Olympians.

By the NCAA's own numbers, former Pac-12 member USC, now in the Big Ten, has the most athletes in Paris of any college at 58, followed by second-place Stanford at 54 and fourth-place Cal at 41, both now ACC members. One of those Stanford athletes is swimming legend Katie Ledecky, who blew away the field in the 1,500 meters on Wednesday.

So, of course, the ACC decided to celebrate the accomplishment. With the hashtag #OlympiansMadeHere.

In case the well-deserved X community note doesn't make it clear, the ACC helped Ledecky win gold about as much as you did.

Ledecky won her first Olympic gold medal in 2012 at 15 years old, then went to Stanford in 2016 and graduated in 2020. She competed in the Pac-12 every year. It was only four years after her graduation that Stanford, desperate for a landing spot after the Pac-12's pillaging, opted for the compromise of all compromises and joined a conference named after a coast 3,000 miles away.

Of course, the ACC isn't alone in claiming an athlete that never competed under its banner. The Big 12, new home of Arizona State, was very happy about the Olympic triumph of Sun Devils star Léon Marchand.

To be fair to these conferences, it's not like the Pac-12, now composed only of Washington State and Oregon State, has celebrated the accomplishments of these swimmers. The only way they have noted the Olympics so far on X is a retweet of Oregon State praising Jade Carey, a gymnast who was part of Team USA's gold medal-winning team.

One conference official noted as much to The Athletic's Chris Vannini, saying they wanted to celebrate these athletes if their old conference's remnants wouldn't.

However, this all shows there's no escaping how uncanny a landscape feels after its maps have been ripped up more than ever before. It's hard to see Stanford in the ACC ever feeling natural, like we're all just waiting for the day that all of college sports' leaders decide to just put everything back where it used to be.

For now, though, the ACC will keep its lead in the medal count.