A Theory of Why the ACC Keeps Tripping Over Itself

A theory:

Back in the day, Big East football could always be counted on for one thing: tripping all over themselves whenever the spotlight got turned on them. Pitt was generally the worst offender, but there certainly was enough blame to spread around - West Virginia pulled it off, and Virginia Tech, and even UConn when it accidentally wandered onto the big stage.

On The Exit Of The Turtle

For the past few weeks, you could hear it building.

All the ACC folk, cheerfully circling Sunday's Virginia-Maryland tilt at the end of the ACC regular season. Anticipating with pleasure the thought of a resurgent Virginia taking Maryland to task for the grievous sin of leaving the conference. Hoping out loud that the Terps' last regular season game would be a whupping of epic proportions, with league champion Virginia standing in for Duke and Carolina to do the honors. That Maryland would be ushered out of the league it was abandoning with an epic loss.

Midnight In the Madison Square Garden of Good And Evil

We shall not see their like again. But at least Rollie cleaned up a bit

As I've mentioned elsewhere, rooting for a conference is a lot like rooting for a law firm. For all of the protestations of tradition and competition and everything else, it's a business partnership and nothing more. When the first rumblings of dissolution shook the Big 12, nobody remembered that it had been built on the still-warm corpses of the Big 8 and the Southwest Conference. Coach K might have ranted against Maryland leaving the tradition and the rivalries of the ACC, but once upon a time Duke bid the Southern Conference a hasty farewell. And Louisville, well, Louisville basketball's been a part of 6 different conferences over the years, not that anyone's rushing to hand a nine-figure TV deal to the Kentucky Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. 

That being said, I find myself sad that the old Big East is dead.

Boeheim At the Grey Havens

Also pictured: Rollie Massamino, John Thompson and Lou Carnesecca

Sometimes, a man knows when to step off the stage.

Check the ending of The Lord of Rings. (The real ending, not the six or seven extras from the last movie). Frodo knows the world is changing. Middle-Earth is no place for him any more. It’s time to move on, and so off he goes to Elfland, or, as those of us not living in the Third Age call it, “retirement in Boca Raton”.

Second in Line for the Beatdown

The funny thing about picking on the fat kid (or the smart kid, or the small kid) in school is that there's always the chance the fat kid's going to move away. And when he does, the bullies and the opportunists and the sadists never seem to pack up and say "Oh, well, now that he's gone we might as well behave." No, they look around for the second-fattest kid, or the second-smartest, or the second-smallest, and they make that kid the new target.
Congratulations, ACC. You're the second-fattest kid.
For years, you've been trying desperately to hang with the cool kids in major conference college sports by pillaging the nerd conference to your north, the Big East. BC, Miami and Virginia Tech. Pittsburgh and Syracuse. Notre Dame. And all the while crowing about how you were proactive, how you'd strengthened yourself, how you were immune to the cherry-picking that was going on across the country because you were ahead of the curve.
And then today, the Big 10(ish) made it rain all over College Park, and Maryland left. Left despite there being a $50M penalty for walking out of the ACC - that's how much extra money is on the table for someone who joins the Leaders & Legends of the Rust Belt, that even with the $50M cover charge, it's still worth it. Worth it to the Big 10, which gets a foothold in a major eastern television market (and another one with Rutgers) and a corresponding boost in revenues to the Big 10 Network. Worth it to Maryland, which had to kill seven sports this year because of athletic department budget shortfalls. In other words, this was a no-brainer for the Terps, and the alumni and the talk radio hosts howling today about the loss of tradition had better understand that. (They'd also better understand that the glorious ACC tradition they loved so much had already been thoroughly trampled by importing football programs wholesale into their basketball conference, bloating their conference tourney, and exploding their schools' travel budgets for varsity sports by including trips to Miami and Boston.)
But if you ask me, this is only the beginning. Maybe they raid the Big East one more time to replace the Terps, filling the hole with Connecticut. But UConn football's not worth the add, and UConn basketball's no sure thing in the post-Jim Calhoun era, either. And in the meantime, the sharks are circling. There's rumors of Florida State being on the Big 12's radar. Of Clemson going to the SEC. Of North Carolina - venerable Chapel Hill, as ACC as ACC gets - going to the Big 10 when that behemoth rouses itself to fill out a roster of 16.
Maybe Louisville's left as a viable acquisition target in the Big East. Maybe UConn. But that's it. And when the biggest nerd is down for the count, it's the next in line that becomes the target.
Congratulations, ACC. It's your turn.

The Ballad of the Self-Hating Nerd

Once upon a time, there were two nerds who kind of hung around on the fringes of the cool kid crowd. At some point, one of the nerds (we'll call him ACC football) decided that the best way to get the cool kids to really like him was to beat the crap out of the other nerd (we'll call that one Big East football), take his lunch money, and then brag about it. The cool kids (we'll call them - oh, for God's sake, you get the metaphor already, do I really have to spell it out) encouraged the ACC to do this. Meanwhile, the Big East did the equivalent of turning around and beating up some second graders (see: Conference USA, the MAC, etc) to prove that it could be cool, too, not that anyone believed him.
But when the first nerd went to the cool kids to show off what he had done and to ask to be allowed to do cool kid stuff, the four cool kids laughed at him and set up a 4 team football championship that was held in a secret clubhouse marked "NO NERDS ALLOWED".
Because, really, for all the chest-thumping about the any-day-now renaissance in ACC football on local sports talk radio here in Raleigh, the ACC has done a remarkable job of screwing itself by raiding the Big East. By kicking the pins out from under the other "lesser" AQ (Automatic Qualifier) league, the ACC made it easier for the whole thing to be scrapped in a way that will leave them out in the cold. That's why we're getting a four team playoff, and that's why every year, those four teams will be from the SEC, Big 10, Big 12 and Pac-12.
You want evidence? The Big 12-SEC bowl game that just got announced, also known as the "I'm Taking My Toys And Going Home Bowl" is proof that the sport's rich kids do not intend to share, now or ever, with the kids on the outside. I mean, sure, they made a handwave gesture at it when they expanded the BCS, so that one non-AQ team per year could be invited to a not-anywhere-near-the-established-power-structure game (usually against Pittsburgh),  but that was mainly to shut the critics up. Yeah, Boise State finally got to play in a BCS game, but the there was no way, ever, the BCS formula would let them get close to the championship.
And now even the pretense of fairness is going away, and it's the ACC - not the Pac-10's raid on the Big 12, or the Big 10's swipe of Nebraska, or anything else that did it. Because as rotten and unfair as the BCS was, it at least paid lip service to the idea that maybe somebody outside the biggest of the big conferences could get a seat at the table. And now that's gone. By pantsing the Big East, the ACC demonstrated convincingly that the entire notion of "an AQ conference" was non-viable. And if the Big East wasn't good enough to be invited to the party, then what about the guys who kept trying to improve their football by raiding the Big East? When Wake Forest wins your league championship in recent memory, you're not seen as a serious football conference, no matter how many Syracuses and Virginia Techs you gulp down. And if you're not seen as a serious football conference, you're not going to get your champion into that lucrative new playoff. Four teams, remember. Not six, for the AQ conferences. Not 8, including a few non-conf champs or non-"AQ" conferences. Four.
Let's do the math and run down the theoretical "powers" of ACC football. FSU is looking for the exits, Miami is waiting for the NCAA hammer, VT traditionally spits the bit on the big stage, and Clemson got thoroughly spanked when it got up in front of an audience last year. Adding perennial Big East underachievers Pitt and Syracuse isn't going to help the Strength of Schedule of anyone else in the league1. And that's going to kill anyone whom the league tries to spit out as a playoff contender end of season; the polls are going to look at a schedule full of conference roadkill and say they fail the sniff test; the computer formulae are going to notice the marshmallow-soft seasons, and as a result, the ACC champ is going to be sitting home pretty much every damn year, while the Kirk Herbstreits of the world just nod and shake their heads and talk about how the numbers prove impartially that they just weren't good enough.
Just like the Big East champ.
So congratulations, self-hating nerd. You screwed yourself. The four cool kids don't want to share. And thanks to you, they don't have to.







1Indeed, it can be argued that one of the main reasons Big East football turned into a punchline was Pittsburgh - between tripping up an unbeaten West Virginia team that was championship-game bound as the finale of an otherwise mediocre season and completely crapping the bed every time they were talked about as a national contender, they did more to lower the profile of Big East football than any other single school.