ACC overexpansion goes to overtime

6-22-03

By EDWARD CONE
News & Record

This game is going into overtime.

The member universities of the Atlantic Coast Conference keep talking and talking about  expanding the league. With any luck, they’ll talk the idea to death.

There are many good reasons to oppose expansion, but the one that really matters to me is that expansion is a fix for something that ain’t broke. Tampering with tradition is a dangerous business, and the ACC is putting everything it has built over the last half century in danger.

Adding Miami, Syracuse, and Boston College (and maybe Virginia Tech) to the ACC is a bad idea for other reasons, too, from the stresses imposed on non-revenue sports by the geography of a megaconference to the bad karma of breaking up another league. Just taking Miami, another option that has been under discussion, wouldn’t be so bad, because then the ACC wouldn’t be split into two divisions – the outcome I fear most.

The three-or-four-team expansion deal makes sense in terms one thing: television money. This is the chance for a promotion in the big business of televised football. It’s about building a  conference that is big enough to split into two divisions, in order to hold a high-dollar championship game each year and send an extra team to a lucrative big-name bowl game.

League honchos say it’s not about the benjamins, but they have not come up with more plausible motivations for transforming the ACC into the SEC. It may be a preemptive move to keep Florida State from bolting to some other football conference down the road. Beyond that…well, I guess it could be about consummating that natural rivalry between Wake Forest and Boston College, or the thrill of seeing Syracuse wipe the field with Duke on a regular basis, with the cheating and thuggery associated with the top-tier “amateur” football as an added bonus.

Five Big East universities have sued to keep their estranged sister schools from leaving. They were joined by the Virginia attorney general, who is defending the interests of a scorned ACC suitor, Virginia Tech, which reportedly is now back in the mix. Adding Tech, of course, makes sense in terms of everything but TV-market size, which is why it almost got left behind.

Teachers – remember them? – don’t seem to like the idea, either. “It's time to tell these professional sports managers at the A.C.C. that we are universities first," said UNC faculty chair Sue Estroff to the New York Times. "We are delighted we slowed this down. I hope it brings it to a grinding halt. I would like to hear nothing but the screeching of tires up and down the East Coast."

But to me the worst thing about expansion is that the larger league would almost have split up the Big Four, the North Carolina schools at the heart of the ACC. I guess you could throw out the map and put Duke, NC State, North Carolina, and Wake Forest in a division with, say, Virginia and Clemson. Then Florida State, Georgia Tech, and Maryland could join the three or four new schools in a frequent flyer division that nobody around here would care about, anyway. But that’s not going to happen. 

Doing away with the traditional in-state football rivalries would be bad enough. But what would expansion do basketball, the heart and soul of the ACC? The home-and-home match-ups, year after year, are what made the conference great. But given NCAA rules on the number of games a team can play each season, combined with divisional scheduling requirements and the desire of coaches to play tournaments and mix in a few cupcakes, the good old days seem likely to disappear. Clemson’s eternal quest to win at Chapel Hill, Maryland’s white-hot rivalry with Duke – something has got to give.

One other bad thing from a Greensboro  perspective: a bigger ACC will mean fewer tickets for each school at the conference tourney, which might then be forced to seek out bigger and bigger arenas – arenas that are not only are worse places to watch basketball, but also aren’t in Greensboro. 

Let’s hope the overexpansion gets beat in overtime.

Edward Cone (efcone@mindspring.com, www.edcone.com) contributes a column to the News & Record on Sunday.

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