My friend and long-time AFP colleague, Scott German, is already lamenting what he assumes is the inevitable demise of the ACC, to the point that he wonders if this week’s ACC Kickoff may be the last.
I don’t see us quite being there yet, but I also don’t know that I’ll miss the ACC when it does happen like Scott and a lot of other long-timers will.
“The acc as we knew it hasn’t been the same since swofford started expanding it.”
This is what I texted Scott as the essence of my debating stance as we discussed whatever is to come.
The ACC is now at 15 schools. It was eight forever, then grew to nine with the addition of Florida State in the early 1990s.
The move to add Virginia Tech, Miami and Boston College in the mid-aughts was where things shifted for me.
Then we saw Notre Dame, Pitt, Syracuse and Louisville come on board a decade later.
The ACC as it is now is a hybrid of the ACC and the Big East, the goal of former long-time commish John Swofford with the expansions being to make the conference a major player in football.
It didn’t work.
Virginia Tech was a Top 10 football school for a while, but hasn’t been relevant nationally for a decade now, and Miami has never been what anybody thought it would be since it joined the ACC.
Notre Dame isn’t even a football member; the school just uses the ACC to be able to compete for NCAA bids in other sports, and laps the other schools in TV money because of its sweetheart deal with NBC.
You can argue with me that the ACC as we know it now wouldn’t still be here if Swofford and the league presidents hadn’t tried, and I’ll concede that point.
My counterpoint: it’s barely here now.
Which is why where I am with this is, when the ACC ceases to be, and the writing is on the wall on that, I’m not going to get all misty-eyed about it.
My lasting memory of the Frankenstein version of the ACC that we’ve had for the past 20 years will be the media room at the 2014 ACC Tournament.
As it turned out, my seat on the media row backstage there was on what I came to call “Big East Row.”
I was surrounded by writers there to cover the old Big East schools who clearly didn’t want to be in Greensboro, constantly referring to the ancestral home of the ACC as a “hick town,” whining about having nowhere to go out drinking at night, promising to make a push to get the ACC to move the tournament to New York in the future, which of course is what happened.
Whatever happens to the ACC, my alma mater and the school that I cover, UVA, is going to be just fine, with either a plum spot in the SEC or the Big Ten.
I texted this to Scott, who still can’t seem to get over mourning what the ACC used to be.
“Virginia will have a landing spot. They’ll make more money. But it won’t be the same as the ACC,” he texted back.
Man, the ACC ain’t been what it used to be since the Scott Sisson field goal split the uprights.
Florida State joined the league a few months later, we had to have a play-in game at the Tournament, and it’s not been the same since.
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Chris Graham
