Very Interesting!

[50's PONY]

Fiu's crystal ball realignment thoughts

Richard Cirminiello

Now that Miami and Virginia Tech have joined the ACC, what does it really mean?

The ripple effects from the ACC’s addition of Miami and Virginia Tech will be felt for years throughout college sports like a Nor’easter trucking straight for the Atlantic Coast. This was big. So big in fact that its tentacles will reach well beyond the gridiron and the hardwood and into court houses, women’s practice fields, ethics classrooms and every other conference with a Division I-A intercollegiate program.

The by-products from this messy marriage/divorce are as numerous as the debates whether this was good or bad for college football.

1. Just like that, the ACC may have expanded itself into becoming the toughest football conference in America.
With NC State, Virginia and Maryland on the rise, the ACC already looked like a conference to be reckoned with. Add the Canes and the Hokies and you’ve got six bona fide top 25 contenders for the foreseeable future. Of the eleven members, the conference will have just a single pushover in football—Duke.

2. The ACC gets to retain Florida State.
Had the ACC not increased its membership, the Noles would have considered peddling its affiliation elsewhere. Ironically, the Big East was a potential suitor.

3. Things just got a whole lot tougher for Bobby Bowden and the Seminoles.
As if it wasn’t bad enough that Bowden’s stranglehold on ACC supremacy was slipping fast, now here come two of the sport’s perennial powerhouses. Gone are the days when Florida State could book its tickets in August for a major bowl game.

4. Seeking survival, the Big East gets to display their hypocrisy.
Before you know it, Tranghese and the Big East will transition from preachers to pursuers, in effect, practicing the very behavior they’ve been criticizing for the past two months.

5. The trend toward super conferences will debilitate the mid majors.
When conferences like the Big East or the Pac-10 contemplate expansion in the coming months, programs from Conference USA, the Mountain West and the WAC are likely to be in their crosshairs.

6. Schools such as Louisville, and possibly Marshall and Cincinnati are about to be courted like royalty by the Big East.
Because of their rich basketball tradition and improving football program, the Cardinals look like an ideal match for the Big East. Simply getting Rick Pitino to the Garden each March for the Big East Tournament would be worth making the offer. While their pitching, the conference should turn its attention to Penn State, an eastern football team if there ever was one.

7. The fellas on Tobacco Road just added a couple of easy W’s.
Gimmes in ACC basketball are hard to come by. In Tech and Miami, the Dukes and North Carolinas of college basketball just received a rare breather.

8. Somewhere, a bunch of lawyers are grinning.
What else is new? Two parties battle it out and no one fares better than the attorneys. The lawsuit filed by the remaining members of the Big East is alive and well.

9. The NCAA will change the rule which states a conference must have 12 teams to hold a championship game.
This way, everyone’s happy. The Pac-10, Big Ten and ACC get to profit from an annual title game and the eventual pilfering by the latter conferences becomes less of a necessity.

10. Rivalries between Miami and Florida State and Virginia Tech and Virginia will intensify now that a conference title and a BCS bowl berth could be at stake.
Hard to imagine, but the rancor between these programs should ratchet up a notch or two beginning in 2004.

11. The path to national prominence has gotten bumpy for Virginia, Maryland and NC State.
Until this past week, Florida State was the only serious roadblock for these three surging football programs. Keeping pace with Tech is doable. Surpassing the Canes is a whole different ball of wax.

12. Wake Forest takes a big hit.
Very quietly, Jim Grobe has done some real nice things in Winston-Salem. However, each year, they ride the bowl bubble, and the addition of two bowl certainties could nudge them into an early off-season.

13. The Big East will retain its automatic BCS bowl bid, giving fans something else to [deleted] about in December.
Does anyone really want to see an 8-4 Boston College or Pittsburgh squad get hammered in the Orange Bowl when a more deserving team is playing in the Holiday Bowl?

14. Women’s Big East sports programs will feel the pinch.
The potential loss of revenue by the conference could have a profound impact on other athletics, including women’s programs, which rely heavily on the steady stream of income generated by the football teams.

15. John Swofford will be hailed as a modern day Roy Kramer.
Kramer, the former SEC commissioner, is considered a pioneer for the way he transformed his conference into an economic, made-for-TV entity during his tenure. In two or three years, people will forget the tumult that followed this process, and Swofford will be labeled a genius for turning the ACC into a power football conference.

16. Like never before, Notre Dame will be the apple of everyone’s eye.
If anyone can begin to bail the Big East out of this disaster, it’d be the Fighting Irish. Isn’t it about time the Domers do something for the greater good? Don’t bet on it.

17. If anyone exits this soap opera in worse shape than the Big East, it’s Myles Brand and the NCAA.
Where was the NCAA President throughout this debacle? Where was the leadership from the NCAA? Brand played the part of the hands-off Dad, who has no control over his petulant child.

18. Games like Miami at Pittsburgh and Virginia Tech at West Virginia will have an added twist in 2003.
Hell hath no fury like a scorned woman. Or program, for this discussion. The Canes and the Hokies best be prepared for more than the usual icy reception when they set out on their farewell tours.

19. The ACC now has itself quite a collection of competent coaches.
Bowden, Coker, Beamer, Amato, Friedgen, Groh...pretty impressive.

20. Miami fans will have a much easier time getting to road games
At the end of the day, the Canes had as much business being in the Big East as I had starring in my high school production of Your Arms Too Short To Box With God. Geographically, it never made any sense. The Big East headquarters is in Providence, RI, which is 1,475 miles from Coral Gables. Rivalries are rooted in history, logistics and recruiting wars, none of which was ever going apply to Miami and the rest of the Big East.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Matthew Zemek

Now that Miami and Virginia Tech have joined the ACC, what does it really mean?

1-The ACC, if it gets a 12th team or not, will be a mighty fun conference to watch.

2-Having Sean McDonough of ABC get ACC games would suddenly befit his prodigious broadcast credentials. No longer will it be said that an announcer was "relegated" to an ACC game.

3-The FSU-Miami rivalry will get better, if that's possible.

4-FSU and Va Tech, with the memories of their 2000 Sugar Bowl still appreciably fresh, will get a nice hot rivalry going before too long.

5-The Big East needs to--and probably will--land some big Upper Midwestern fish in the near future.

6-Say what you want about Donna Shalala--I thought she was one of the Clinton Cabinet's brighter lights; this disappoints me greatly--but on a larger level, can it ever be said again with a straight face that college presidents are really being honest when they speak against a playoff in the name of academics? Can this notion possibly hold any less credibility? If you didn't see the hypocrisy and fakery before, you have to see it now. College presidents are just self-interested; I find it rich on the Va Tech sid