With the ACC's decision to expand to twelve teams, there is talk of a new superconference rising along the eastern seaboard. Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College are joining the nine current members of the conference. Assuming the schools involved accept the invitations, the ACC will be able to have a conference playoff game, the associated television revenues, and additional opportunities to send the much coveted two teams to the BCS. While this reasoning seems sound, the way in which the ACC is planning to do it is actually a very poor idea. And the expected, cataclysmic fallout will actually only be whimper.
First of all, the ACC is a basketball conference, pure and simple. Aside from Florida State, only Georgia Tech and Clemson can begin to claim much of a football tradition. And, while they certainly have loyal fan bases, they are not the sort of teams that regularly strike fear into the hearts of men. These are teams about on par with Stanford, Texas A&M and Louisiana State. Not to say these teams are bad, but nobody is going to confuse them with the likes of Southern California, Oklahoma and Tennessee. Compare this with the basketball strongholds of Tobacco Road and it is easy to see that football is not the ACC's big-time game.
The ACC is not attempting to shore up good football with strategic additions. The ACC is attempting to create good football with a 33% increase in quantity. Even if this was a good idea, Virginia Tech and Boston College are not the ways to do that and Miami football is an iffy proposition in the long run. This is not on par with the Big Ten's decision to bring in Penn State, which was a watershed event in college football. Almost all the major independents of the time, Notre Dame being the obvious exception, were swarming to join conferences following the Big Ten's expansion. All this expansion and reshuffling culminated in the Big Eight bringing in Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, and Baylor to become the Big XII. One move and the entire landscape of college football was changed. However, the ACC expansion is affecting only the minor conferences. The Big East was holding onto its BCS bid pretty tentatively before, and the trickle down effect is, otherwise, only hitting mid-majors such as Conference USA, possibly the MAC, and some minor independents. In ten years, a short period of time for college football, this will be almost unnoticeable.
Virginia Tech is an unremarkable addition. While they have built an annual contender out there in Blacksburg, they are still a long way from being a perennial powerhouse. The brilliant Frank Beamer, while he is certainly one of the best coaches in the nation, is still not recruiting the sort of football players that are going to strike fear into the hearts of men. He is still at a marginal school that can draws mostly projects. In other words, he gets good football players that he hopes are going to work out hard enough to be able to play at the next level in two or three years. While that is very good and it has worked well for him, a few slips and a recruiting class that doesn't quite pan out is going to take everything he has built and flush it down the toilet. He is investing in risky prospects and anybody who saw how the stock market turned out in the late '90's knows, high risk can bring big returns, but it is no way to build a long-term strategy.
Virginia Tech does bring a heated rivalry in-conference, now that their annual tilt with Virginia has conference implications. However, does anybody outside the state of Virginia ever watch the Virginia-Virginia Tech game? Does anybody even care who wins it? Does anybody think the conference implications for this game are going to push it beyond the level of the Mississippi-Mississippi State game or the Washington-Washington State game? Does anybody, myself excluded, really get excited about who the heck wins these games, unless it turns out to be a major upset? Even if it is a major upset, does anybody really do anything aside from say, "Wow, that's surprising!" before turning to the next page to learn more about how the Michigan-Ohio State or Notre Dame-USC game turned out the way it did?
Boston College brings even less to the equation. Their only claims to fame are an ability to frustrate Notre Dame at inconvenient times (or convenient, depending on one's opinion of the Irish) and Doug Flutie. They are also unremarkable in almost every other sense. The Eagles provide nothing that Virginia or N.C. State don't already have, so why muddy the waters with another somewhat above average team?
An argument could made that BC opens up a new television market to the ACC. However, one must think to themselves, what market? How many Bostonians really hang on Boston College's every play? Does anybody think that the Eagles are even in the same ballpark, league or to quote a line from Pulp Fiction, "even the same fucking sport" as the Patriots, the Celtics, or even the Bruins? Adding BC to open up Boston as a market is like adding TCU to open up the Dallas-Ft. Worth market. Sure it's there, but does anybody there even notice?
The coup of the deal is, of course, Miami. The Hurricanes bring a pile of football supremacy to the table, as well as the prospect of heating up the FSU-UM rivalry even more with conference implications. The problem, of course, is that the conference is betting its future on a very risky choice.
Miami has had a very impressive run over the last twenty seasons, winning five national titles along with a whopping 83.4% of their games. Add in eight conference championships in the twelve years of Big East membership, and Miami has put together an amazing two decades. But Miami is no sure thing in the long run.
College football, as of now, is not a game of ten, twenty or even fifty years. It is a game of one hundred thirty-five seasons. The first game of college football was played between Princeton and Rutgers. The Ivy League was almost invincible until about 1920. Of all the teams that have played at least five seasons of major college football, the team that compiled the best winning percentage is still Yale (76.3% before the I-A, I-AA split). However, none of these teams are listed among the traditional powerhouses. They simply couldn't last in the long term.
Five national titles. Impressive, I won't argue that. However, closely packed national titles do not guarantee future success. With the Hurricanes' title in 2001, they have finally gotten as many national titles as the great, traditional power from the Big Ten, UM. No, not Michigan… Minnesota. Indeed, the Golden Gophers. With four titles under the great Bernie Bierman, as well as one in 1960, Minnesota put together a jaw-dropping run of their own. But, much as I respect the past of Minnesota, they are not what one would call a traditional powerhouse.
Michigan has been playing football since 1879. Notre Dame has been playing since 1887. Southern California has been playing since 1888. Way out in California, the Trojans began playing football only 23 years after the Civil War! Contrast such teams with Miami, who only started playing football in 1926. The Hurricanes are relative adolescents in the world of college football. And they have a long way to go before they can count themselves among the best of the best. Especially while amassing a winning percentage of 63.7% even after twenty years of dominance. That's very good, but Oklahoma's all-time winning percentage was still at 70% after the 1998 season, just before Bob Stoops was hired and turned around a flailing and failing Sooner squad.
But the biggest reason the Hurricanes are such a big risk is that, quite simply, nobody cares about Miami football. Alright, not quite nobody. All of forty-one thousand people in the Miami area care about the Hurricanes. I say this because that is the average attendance at Hurricanes' home games in 2001. The ACC is tying its future to a team that cannot sell out the twenty-third largest college football stadium. In the heart of a major city, no less. Michigan, Tennessee, Penn State and Ohio State have stadiums holding more than 100,000 people and they don't have too much trouble filling the stands. Even South Carolina, who has, in all honesty, played some abysmal football in the past, manages to bring in more fans.
In addition, Miami is a lousy selection for any bowl game because they don't put fannies in seats. Upwards of 68,000 of the 73,000 people in Sun Devil Stadium for the 2003 Fiesta Bowl were wearing scarlet and gray. Yet there are stories (though probably apocryphal ones) of Miami fans not even feeling the need to watch this year's Fiesta Bowl. What BCS bowl, aside from the hometown Orange, would want to invite a team that cannot even draw for the biggest game of the year?
Overall, the ACC has bet its future on a plan that is ill-advised and schools that are, at best, very risky propositions. Quantity does not mean quality; the WAC learned that lesson the hard way in the '90's. At best, the ACC can hope to secure a place as being clearly the fifth best football conference behind the Big XII, Big Ten, Pac-10 and SEC. At worst, it will free Big East schools to find better conference affiliations that would leave the ACC behind. Is that risk really worth the potential reward?