Honestly I'd be surprised if Cal is coming along. They have a smallish following, and TV numbers suggest smaller than Stanford. (I understand the demographics behind this phenomena; it makes sense if you actually dig into it.) Also the Bay Area can be covered sparsely, doesn't need dense two teams overlay like Los Angeles. Note, I'm sure if the Big Ten and SEC were starting over there would be only one school in Alabama, Mississippi, Michigan and Indiana; none of them need overlapping coverage.
My sense is the Big Ten is waiting on Notre Dame. If this were TV coverage only, Arizona State would be my backup for Notre Dame. Arizona would work too. Sparse coverage could give you Phoenix along with San Francisco, Portland and Seattle should Notre Dame stay on the sideline. Of course the downside is Phoenix doesn't bring the media and sponsors the others do (Apple, Meta, Google, Netflix are all SF Bay Area, Nike is Portland and Amazon in Seattle ... there are many other sponsorship players not mentioned, I just stuck to media/streaming plus the king of sports sponsorship in Nike). Southwest is nice, but yeah.
Anyway if Notre Dame rides it out, Cal could win the lottery. Remember being evaluated is not the same as being invited. A lot more schools are evaluated than accepted. A lot of things need to happen to get anywhere.
Something to keep in mind, the Pac-12 are all available in 2024, with no exit fee. Notre Dame might be subject to the $96M exit fee of the ACC, even if the GoR on basketball is only $70-90M for them (10 years at say $7-9M in today's money if they join the B1G in '26, or pay a tax of $10M or so a year for 10 years to the ACC to leave). And keep in mind every Pac-12 school would happily take a haircut on B1G revenue this cycle to join.
https://accfootballrx.blogspot.com/2016/...-fees.html
Note: Texas and Oklahoma by staying until 2024 lower their exit fee to only one year of distributions (mostly media, plus some basketball credits and a few really small other earnings, the rest cannot be withheld as the conference is a direct pass through of NCAA funds for school specific targets like APR), which is probably in the low $30M range. However there is no reason for the Big 12 to release the GoR, so all 2024-25 SEC media revenue for those two schools would instead go to the Big 12 conference. I can only see a settlement reached if both Fox and ESPN tell the Big 12 they won't cut revenue for '24-25 if those two leave. Otherwise it's either a zero sum at best for the Big 12 just recouping the revenue drop, or if they demand a high number then a revenue negative for Texas and Oklahoma. A media provider will only eat a year if they are part of new extension (long one too), and I'm not sure Fox is interested. Seems an impasse to me.