NCAAbbs

To recap:
- Some f***ing idiot thought It'd be a good idea to have the ACC Championship game in Jacksonville, which might as well be suburbs of Athens and Gainesville. Attendance was expectedly terrible.
- To correct the above mistake, they moved the game to Tampa for two years, which is EVEN FURTHER away for most people, and a resident Big East school is still dwarfed by SEC fan support.
- NCAA tournament bids have been lower than what they were as a 9-team league.
- BC, VT, Miami have collectively done NOT A DAMN THING on the national level IN ANY SPORT.
- The Round Robin is gone.
- Rivalries like FSU-GT and some tobacco road combinations are now not yearly in football.
- BC has terrible fan support, and is so far north it destroys the geography of the league.
- The bowls are *absolutely effing terrible*!!!! We added 3 teams, and to compensate added one mediocre bowl. ACC has NO business playing in the Emerald Bowl ... ever. It's on a fackin baseball field. It's always a pseudo-home game for the Pac-10 team. At least the Smurf Turf game is on an actual football field. ACC needs another decent or better east coast bowl.


Why not:
- Just have added Miami or VT and have a 10 team league?
- Drop BC. Even UCF would be a better choice.
- Fire Swofford, that idiot responsible, who has also shafted GT even more than the ACC refs in basketball.

Oh how I miss the days of a home and home with everyone in basketball and playing everyone in football...

-Thankfully Charlotte is on the horizon for the ACC Championship game, where it should be and make it permanently, like the way the SEC does it in Atlanta (and unlike the Big12 which moves it around).
-The ACC hasn't been that good in the basketball game since expansion. The other three teams aren't really at fault here though. Hell, VT has been better since. I'm thinking the committee is biased towards the big east/big ten anyway.
-All three expansion schools have been ranked in the top 3 at some point since expansion, but all have choked it away (BC at 2 before losing to FSU last year, VT at #3 going into the bowl game last year, Miami at #3 in 2005 before the magnificent upset by GT at home late). Then again, what have the other ACC teams done in the meantime? NOTHING!
-BC has a television market, that's why they were brought in. I don't know if I agree with that or not though.
-Supposedly this year there will be a bowl game in Washington DC called the Congressional Bowl, pitting a service academy (if available) against an opponent from the ACC. It has not received approval from the NCAA yet (sometime this month that should happen) but does have the ACC signed to it, and maybe that will replace San Francisco as a bowl game. I do *not* like football games played in baseball stadiums either, so I hope the ACC just drops it.

One thing I'd like to see is conference realignment. I don't like the way it was split, it should be geographical like the way the SEC and Big12 did it.

Dont blame us, Duke and UNC voted "no" to expansion

ACC Expansion was a failure because they added Boston College instead of West Virginia.

If they would have added West Virginia they could have had a more competitive league.

Football
Northern Division
Duke
Maryland
North Carolina
Virginia
Virginia Tech
West Virginia

Southern Division
Clemson
Florida State
Georgia Tech
Miami
North Carolina State
Wake Forest

Basketball & Baseball
Northern Division
Maryland
Virginia
Virginia Tech
West Virginia

Central Division
Duke
North Carolina
North Carolina State
Wake Forest

Southern Division
Clemson
Florida State
Georgia Tech
Miami

The ACC will be fine, the only mistake they made was putting the Conference Championship Game in Jacksonville, which is a PRO SEC City. Once FSU and UM recover, all that talk will go away. The BE will take UM,VT, and BC back in a NY minute. I think the conference championship game should be rotated between Orlando and Charlotte.

Our recruiting has picked backed up over the past two years. Also we have made some nice coaching changes as well. Plus we play better OOC opponents do not pad our win totals against creampuffs like some conferences do.

Quite possibly the dumbest post ever.

West Virginia would have had ZERO support from ACC schools for two huge reasons:
1. They are in a non-existent TV market.
2. Their academics. You think UNC and Duke were upset about the expansion candidates we ended up with they would have likely taken up arms over WVU.

But I'll play along with your outlandish scheme to make a point.

No way in Hades either alignment would have been made. The football alignment puts 4 out of the 6 schools that put a priority in football in the Southern Division.

There is no need for divisions in basketball, although I'd be really happy with Clemson being in the Southern Division as out of the three it's by far going to be the easiest to win. NC State and Wake would be having kittens having to go through both of the 800lb gorillas just to win the division every year.

I agree.. one sign that is not encouraging is the lack of ACC teams in the NCAA Tourney. Committee made a HUGE mistake putting too many SEC teams in, but did a favorable job trying to please most teams. VaTech needed to be in the tourney, but expansion likely is the real culprit why VaTech's bubble burst.

West Virginia doesn't have the academics for the ACC. The worst ACC school academically is on par with the BEST in the SEC and Big East.

I guess the one thing expansion has brought us, is a hockey championship

I will reiterate again that the ACC needs to change its football divisions to a traditional North/South model and stop trying to force Florida State vs. Miami in hopes of getting a title game sellout. It has not happened so far and, quite obviously, will not become an annual occurance anytime in the near future. To prevent losing old rivalries, each team should have two permanent rivals from the opposite division, and then just slowly rotate the other four foes from the opposite division. Put the title game in Charlotte where it would generate the biggest turnout and most loyal support.

EXAMPLE ACC NORTH

BC / Maryland
Virginia Tech / Virginia
North Carolina / Duke

EXAMPLE ACC SOUTH

Wake Forest / North Carolina State
Clemson / Georgia Tech
Florida State / Miami

Eventually it will also become clear that there is no reason for Boston College to remain in the ACC. Temple would provide just as big of a market, get the ACC a foothold in the Northeast as they wish, and is actually located in an adjoining state. Boston College must eventually realize they need to get back together with the Big East football schools in a league based in the Northeast. Whether they are intelligent enough to admit their mistake, or stubborn enough to never undo their mistake, is a totally different matter but the ACC would be better with North/South divisions.

I could see the ACC making a move to add Syracuse, Connecticut, Rutgers and Pitt to the conference for 16 team all sports league. That would force the Big East to add Memphis, East Carolina, Central Florida and Southern Miss. CUSA would then add Troy, Western Kentucky, Middle Tennessee and La Tech

The fall of the ACC
Tourney woes reflect big problems for league
David Steele | March 24, 2008

Think Duke is off its game in recent years? It's not alone. Its entire conference is not feeling the Madness these days, either.

Feeling mad, yes, because for the second time in three years, the NCAA tournament began with the hallowed Atlantic Coast Conference carrying a chip on its shoulder, beefing about being disrespected, griping that it's under-represented in the 65-team field. And, once again, most of its smaller-than-usual contingent are leaving without getting their dance cards punched.

Faces, yes. Cards, no.

Four went in. Three went out on consecutive days in the first weekend. Two went down to lower-seeded teams from a certain rival mega-conference.

Miami, of all teams, came off looking best, with a solid first-round win and a nail-biter of a loss to Texas yesterday. Miami. One of the football schools. More on that later.

Meanwhile, one of the exiled three, aforementioned Duke, went out with its ears burning.

"Duke's a great team. I think they'd fit in well in the Big East," West Virginia's Joe Alexander said after his team skunked the No. 2 seed Blue Devils in the second round Saturday in Washington. "But they definitely wouldn't dominate the Big East. We had a lot of great teams. I think the top six or seven teams are definitely right on par with Duke in the Big East, and the rest of them are right up there, too."

We pause here to remind the readers that this came from the Big East's fifth-place team and the second-lowest seed of the conference's eight entrants.

Oh, and that in the first round, the Big East team lower than it -- bubble team and No. 12 seed Villanova -- booted No. 5 seed Clemson, the third-place finisher in the ACC regular season and conference tournament finalist.

Yikes.

Of course, Alexander spoke prematurely -- almost as soon as his mouth closed, Big East teams started falling. Four bit the dust within the next 24 hours, including Georgetown.

The Hoyas' collapse probably wiped out a good two-thirds of America's brackets. Then again, that does prove his point about Duke and the Big East.

That's a separate issue from the ACC's artificially high impression of itself, though. It's still a painful fact that the ACC has the same number of teams alive as the Southern Conference (welcome, Davidson).

The ACC wasn't as good as advertised. It's not as good as it used to be, even just a few years ago.

Lately, it has been the Colonial Athletic Association with a better television deal. (Oooh, that's cold -- until you remember which league has reached the Final Four most recently.) Just shouting, "We're the ACC!" every March doesn't cut it anymore.

Or, as one West Virginia fan across from the scorer's table sang in the final minutes of the Duke game: "O-ver-ra-ted!"

Figuring out what went wrong would help -- and though it's hard to draw a straight line from one to another, one can say this much: Before it made its money/power grab in 2005 and raided the Big East for its football heavyweights, it was the conference we've always known. Since then, the numbers don't lie.

Before the expanded league went into action in 2005-06, the ACC had won three of the previous five national titles and had earned three other Final Four berths in that span.

Same old dominance, different era. In the last pre-expansion season, six teams got in the field, three made the Sweet 16 and North Carolina won it all.

In the next two seasons? No Final Four teams. Just three reaching the Sweet 16.

Throughout this season, the ACC was ranked the best in the country, and its coaches used that to proclaim that their own mediocre records should be graded on some kind of curve.

If you had listened to them -- and Seth "Certifiably Insane" Greenberg, we're talking to you -- and chosen not to believe your eyes, you wouldn't have noticed that the ACC was top-heavy this season with nothing close to the depth of the Big East, Pacific-10 or even the Big 12.

The selection committee believed its own eyes, although it still had a blind spot for Duke, grandfathering it into a No. 2 seed. But not for Greenberg's Virginia Tech team, the only serious bubble team once Maryland jumped off.

As for the ones who made it? Scoreboard.

So now, who can deny today that the ACC -- in the number of invitations and in the "progress" it made through this field -- got just what it deserved?

This article appeared in the Baltimore Sun on Monday, March 24, 2008.

Has ACC expansion be a failure..? Really? I don't believe it has.

I mean, we're sitting here bemoaning the fact that we only got 4 teams in the 'dance' this year. Who's to say that wouldn't have happened if the ACC were at 9 teams...?

The schools have to schedule (and perform) better out-of-conference. That's why Virginia Tech was left out (just like Syracuse back in '07).

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The biggest glaring mistake the league made was placing the football championship game in Jacksonville. IMHO, the football championship game belongs in one of three places:

1) Charlotte
2) Washington, D.C.
3) Baltimore

If there's going to be an occasional bone tossed to the state of Florida, it should be in Miami.

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As for the alignment in football, it's fine just the way it is. A North/South conference alignment is just asking for trouble in the form of a conference split. It's WAY easier to visualize a split with a N/S setup, than it is now.

You put Clemson, Georgia Tech, Miami, and Florida State in the same division and they'll be sending out feelers to SEC members within 10 years.

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NO to West Virginia. If any schools are to be added, the list starts with UConn.

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We need to give BC a chance before we write them off as a failure. I think their addition has been a great one and they've represented the league in a proud fashion.

It's the old-guard that needs to step up.

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Did someone actually mention Central Fredo as an ACC member...?

i think vandy, notre dame, rutgers, pitt, florida, and syracuse might have a beef with that overgeneralization

The worst in the ACC is Florida State at 119. The SEC starts at 114 with South Carolina and drops rapidly from there. All those you listed (with possible exceptions for Cuse and ND) fall into the bottom 1/3 of the ACC IIRC.

this is your brain. this is your brain on drugs

Maybe not putting out SEC feelers...but you do go right back where you started by not optimizing the conference for the sport that pays the bills these days...football. I can assure you that if the ACC were stupid enough to do something like that Clemson would be looking for a new home because it's going to protect it's bell cow sport.

If WVU was an actual option for the ACC, then the ACC would have been wiser picking ECU. ECU is a better geographic fit for the conference and it is a natural rival of NCSU, UNC and VT. But we all know that the "pure and pristine" ACC would never associate with ECU.

Yep the Emerald Bowl does suck. But wouldn't it be wiser to to admit ECU and then send BC and UCF to the BE? This question presupposes that we live in a perfect world and a schools reputation is not an issue.

So should Texas quit the Big 12 because Texas A&M, Oklahoma, and Texas A&M Tech are in the same division? What about Arkansas quitting the SEC because Alabama, LSU, and Auburn are in the same division? Both of those situations are tougher than the proposed ACC South would be. Just about any casual fan can tell you who is in which division of the Big 12 or SEC. For that matter many can also tell you who is in which division of CUSA or the MAC as well. Very few casual fans have any clue who is in which division of the ACC because the alignment is contrived and unnatural.

Evidently you have missed the complaining that the Big XII South schools have done the past couple of years. If the Big XII North schools don't continue to improve the grumbling will only get louder.

Apples to Oranges comparison. The SEC has 12 schools that care about football. The ACC has 6: FSU, Miami, VT, Clemson, GT, and BC.

Real fair comparison there. The SEC has had divisional play for 16 years, the Big XII for 12. The ACC has had divisional play for three. Of course the casual sports fan isn't going to know the divisional makeup. The casual sports fan couldn't name 3 out of 8 Big East teams for the same reason. Talk to me in 9 more years.

Too bad the Big 12 South teams have nowhere to go. Arkansas is not going to leave the SEC to join them so their only other options would be to join the MWC or form a new SWC with CUSA schools. Not likely.

Way to take an unnecessary - and untrue - shot at the Big East for no reason. Casual fans could easily name more than half of the Big East. Divisions not based on geography are a contrived and unnatural thing.

You'd have four NO votes off the bat, and the academics aren't on par.

I agree there GT. lets face it the ACC didn't want exactly what they have.. they wanted CUSE and BC they each would have had a travel partner and CUSE fits in much better with academics. VT has done well with the switch but was forced on the ACC.

First of all let me just state very clearly that ECU is not a viable candidate for the ACC. Academics would clearly be the sticking point, but my post was in reference to the fact that if WVU were being seriously considered for the ACC, then ECU should be as well. The assumption of course was that academics was not a factor or criteria in the consideration.

While you cite four NO votes; you could probably count six yes votes. The six votes would be UNC, NCSU, Duke, WF, UVA and VT. Four of the six schools are in N.C. The two public universities are goverened by the same bodies as ECU, so polictical pressure would presumably be applied to those two universities and the two private ones. In regards to UVA and VT, both UNC and NCSU voted with UVA when VT was admitted into the ACC. UNC was initially against VT and then they (UNC) and Duke did an about face and voted in support of VT, after UVA approached UNC. Of course this type of scenario would never play out, but you could imagine some form of quid pro quo by UVA and VT on behalf of ECU. Like I've stated throughout this post, this would never happen. Not in a billion years.

No way Duke or Wake Forest vote for ECU because there is no pressure the North Carolina politicians can put on them as private institutions. Add to that the fact that they turn their noses up at FSU and Va Tech academically and ECU trails both. The final nail in the coffin is basketball. That's 2 no votes.

Virginia supported VA Tech because they were told by their state government support Va Tech or else. As high a priority that Virginia puts on academics I don't see them supporting ECU. That's three.

I really don't see Clemson supporting a 5th school in North Carolina, especially one that can politically be manipulated to supporting an agenda from Chapel Hill. That's four. ECU is already out of commission and we aren't but halfway through the conference.

I don't see GT or Maryland supporting ECU mainly because of athletics, but with basketball and the NC factor factoring in as well. Six No votes.

BC probably doesn't, neither does FSU. Miami might support ECU since they have some history together. Let's give them the benefit of a doubt and say all three are Yes. Six yes, six no. ECU doesn't get in.

Don't fool yourself....the Big XII South schools would be fine leaving as a
unit, taking Nebraska and Colorado along, and picking up a 9th school out of the CUSA West, the MWC, or the WAC. You can rest assured the BCS bid would follow, so would the TV contract, and with 8 former Big XII schools they'd qualify for an autobid in basketball. Before all is said and done that's exactly what I expect to happen.

Then tell the SEC to swap Vanderbilt and one of either Alabama or Auburn, and CUSA to swap Tulane and Memphis.
Geographic Divisions only seem natural because the SEC went that way first. Had they split another way everybody would be bashing geographical divisions as too simplified. With the setup the ACC has each team plays it's closest rival from the other division. Some Georgia Tech fans whine about losing the FSU game like they lost a huge rival.....but they've only played FSU 20 times. Their cross divisional rival is Clemson, a team they have played 72 times and is the closest school to Atlanta. Of course, if FSU was their cross divisional rival they'd be crying about losing the Clemson game.
With divisional play you are going to lose games against former rivals, there is no way around it outside of going to an 11 game conference schedule. Since that's not going to happen this is as good as it gets.

With geographical divisions, Georgia Tech fans would have both Clemson and Florida State on the schedule every year, along with Miami, North Carolina State, and Wake Forest. They would also get both BC and Virginia Tech as permanent cross division rivals every year. As for the other teams, they would play Maryland home and home for two years, followed by Virginia home and home for two years, North Carolina home and home for two years, and finally Duke home and home for two years. Most important rivalries are with the closest geographical teams anyway and my suggestion would keep all of those intact. It probably will not happen anyway but, in my opinion, it would make a lot of sense for the ACC to consider doing this if they ever go looking for a scheduling alternative.

nm

They should do that instead of this jimmy rigged catering to "football schools". Charlotte should be the host of a football title game because it is in the heart of the conference, even Clemmy fans wouldn't mind that. The basketball schedules need to be fixed too. Wake should be playing us twice every year! Look at their incoming class, we are not scared! And please make the ACC tourney in Greensboro where it belongs.

And no, despite what some of us Carolinians want, EZU will not be part of our conglomeration anytime soon. Although we do have F$U, so I don't see why the academics are an issue.

Oh, and expansion has not failed.

Expansion hasn't been a failure where it counts. Revenues and pay outs are good. Despite the disaster of the ACC football championship in Jacksonville (Tampa may be better because of its transportation, hotel and entertainment options).

The problem is ACC fights a perception. In football, they're considered a step below the big 4. It will take time to fight that stereotype, but Maryland's expansion and conference bowl success will help. In basketball, they were considered the class because it was always 9 better than respectable teams beating up and improving each other as the season wore on. So tits teams had strong RPIs and battle-tested teams able to make tourney runs. However, the real reason behind the ACC basketball success wasn't because it was a small league with parity. It was that it was a strong league that kicked ass in the non-conference season. It still is. Post-expansion, the league still puts up the highest non-conference winning percentage along with one of the highest non-conference strength of schedules. Postseason success hasn't slipped. All that has is the conference bids handed out by the selection committee. The committee has been awarding top bids out to the ACC. Hopefully soon it will return its bubble bids, which will merely make the pay outs even better than they are now.

Here are the schools that would rank ABOVE the 9th ranked academic school in the ACC (Clemson @ #67) according to US News and World Report or above the bottom 1/3 of the conference. Of course the USN&WR is just one ranking criteria.

SEC:
Vandy
UGA
Florida

BE:
ND
Georgetown
SU
Rutgers
Pitt
UConn

I will specifically talk about Pitt now - it is also a member of the AAU - of which only Duke, UNC, UVa, UMd out of the ACC are members. It has a larger endowment than all ACC schools except Duke. It is also a top 10 university in terms of funding by NIH and NSF. For the ranking of Top American Universities - which ranks a universities 'performance' over a wide range of criteria - it ranked ahead of every ACC university but Duke and UNC.

This is by no means the only way to measure a universities performance since they have different missions. If you want to compare Pitt to the Big 10 schools - since the Big 10 has a lot of large research institutions (like Pitt) and is considered with the ACC to be the top academic 1A FB conference then Pitt would rank #5 in the Big 10 in terms of National Public Universities. It would be #4 in academic difficulty in the Big 10 by the Princeton Review. It is a member of the AAU like every other Big 10 university. It is also in the Top-25 (#6 in the Big 10) like every other Big 10 university except Iowa and Indiana in the rankings of the 'Top American Unviversites' - mentioned above.

By many objective measures, Pitt would fit right in with the ACC from an academic perspective and to say that Pitt would be below the ACCs 'standards' is ridiculous.

I don't use USN&WR because their ranking system is a load of crap. They don't normalize per capita on anything. As far as USN&WR is concerned, a massive state public with 40,000 mediocre students getting mediocre degrees is better than a small public with 10,000 elite students getting elite degrees. USN&WR is a points system. It simply rewards you for being very very big, even if you really really suck at everything you do. Use better rankings. I use the one commissioned by the Chinese gov't for purposes of comparing all worldwide universities to their own. It normalizes everything per capita, and is very honest since it only ranks universities outside of China (so they didn't go around and beef up their own internal rankings). And unlike USN&WR, it won't reward places like Texas for simply having 50,000 students.

As I said in the post, it is only one criteria. I've posted others as well that compares Pitt to the ACC schools. Care to post your data or a link to it to back up your claims?

ACC does have some great schools as members...as 10 out of the 12 (sorry Florida State and Maryland), all landed in the USNews Top 100 list for "Best Colleges".

However...one SEC school was ranked HIGHER than 11 of the ACC schools.

Now you know why the SEC "loves" having Vandy as a member.

Vandy was ranked 19th overall...with only 1 ACC school ranked higher (#8 Duke).

Other ACC school rankings in the attached list:

#23 UVA
#28 UNC
#30 Wake Forest
#35 Ga Tech
#36 BC
#52 Miami
#67 Clemson
#71 Va Tech
#85 NC State

Top 100: America's Best Colleges
http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreview..._brief.php

They didn't rank the private schools at all. The Chinese were only interested in how international publics compared to their own. I'll try to find it -- it came up on digg some months ago.

I don't know if you looked at your list carefully swagger but you might have to check it again.

Georgetown is 23 tied with UVA.

But the truth is the rankings are a joke. They're political. Let's use you own state of Georgia as an example.

The fact is every IVY league school is in the northeast from Yale and Harvard to Cornell and Brown. For generations the northeast has been the cradle of quality education in the US. The brightest students from all over the country came to the northeast to be with their own kind. To reverse this trend, your home state of Georgia initiated a "HOPE Scholarship" to keep "B" students in the state. Around that same time these ranking came out to show parity in every region of the country. The economic benefits to this are obvious. College is big money. So perception becomes reality and now perhaps there is more parity.

High schools feed colleges.Ga. schools just instituted a Georgia Performance Standards curriculum to replace their Quality Core Curriculum because the QCC, which ga. has used until recently, was rated the worse in the nation. SAT results from your state reflect this I think Ga. is ranked 49th out of 50 states on average. Your neighbor, South Carolina is 50th. How can a region with the slowest high school students feed the top colleges in the nation?

I could say more but the truth is ranking schools is like ranking FB teams. Syr is ranked 50th but the Newshouse communications at Syracuse is ranked either #1 or #2 in the nation each year. I wonder how many of the editors at US News graduated from an ACC school. But are academics really what we want to talk about? I guess when your sports start to suck as does the ACC's, you start talking about academics. But like your sports, ACC academics are way "Overrated."

Besides FSU (114) is the lowest ranked school out of the SEC, ACC and BE combined. No wonder they had to help their FB players cheat on tests. Anybody joining the ACC from the SEC or the BE would be an academic improvement over FSU. Even Stony Brook (96) from the State University of New York is an academic improvement over FSU.