The stock response in comment sections when I claim that Virginia Tech will travel well to the Sugar Bowl (given our prior record of doing so to three previous Sugar Bowls) is an overhead shot from the 2007 ACC Championship Game in Jacksonville, angled toward BC's side and showing a very thinly-populated stadium.

So let's do a thought experiment for the Big XII and Big Ten fans. Imagine the Fargodome (a non-descript destination on the geographic edge of your conference with few locals interested in your teams) has 70,000 seats. Put both your conference championship game and the bowl game its loser will go to there. Then have your team sent there, on a week's notice, for the third time in three years with the possibility of a fourth trip a month away.

Now play an opponent like Baylor or Northwestern, only with a third of even those schools' traveling fanbases. Your last Fargo trip was the occasion for one of the most embarrassing on-field episodes in school history, and when Northwestern/Baylor visited you for a conference game a month ago, their NFL-ready quarterback stabbed you in the gut with a comeback ESPN has replayed literally hundreds of times since.

If you can confidently say your school would fill 45,000 seats in Fargo, North Dakota under those circumstances, then criticize us. Otherwise, shove it.

@HokiesJournal Hokies Journal

Reading quotes from 2003 stories on VT's move from Big East to ACC, I've learned whatever VT says re: SEC should be taken w/ grain of salt.

It's interesting to read quotes like Mark Giannotto's above and recognize how many smart people who didn't follow Hokie athletics at the time either don't or can't understand the context of that move for Virginia Tech.

2010-11 conference realignment is a money grab (with a side of rivalry paranoia from Texas A&M), any theoretical Virginia Tech participation in this cycle explicitly included. 2003, though, was an existential battle for VT in particular and most of the Big East in general. (The only school I can find that seems to feel now even close to how we felt then is Iowa State.)

At the time, Jim Weaver and Charles Steger were working with a history of being jilted by the dominant, culture-setting athletic power of its region, a less-than-decade-old boot from the Metro Conference of which it had once been a core member, and a Big East all-sports admission under financial terms dictated at gunpoint (five years of zero basketball revenue sharing, five years reduced; VT's first year of full financial membership in the Big East would have been 2010-11). WVU fans rightly crow that they've done just fine since 2004, but in 2003 the future of the Big East's leftovers looked MWC-esque.

Media members should be skeptical in general about accepting public figures' statements. But 2003 Jim Weaver spoke on behalf of a university desperate to preserve meager gains it had taken fifty years to achieve. 2011 Weaver speaks for a successful, profitable member of a conference full of academic peers near whose geographic center it sits. Context matters.

[Canucks fans] are the same people who harbour conspiracy theories, who reportedly threw projectiles at Gary Battman on the ice during the Stanley Cup presentation and one who shouted out while rioting that "this is all Bettman's fault!"

Safely shielded behind the Rockies in Edmonton, Terry Jones goes on the best major-media rant against a losing team I've read since Gregg Doyel's 2007 anti-Illinois basketball blast, then castigates the lunacy in the team's immediate orbit before ripping Vancouver's population as a whole for perpetuating a sporting riot trend. The whole column is a good laugh, but calling out the over-the-top reaction to Bettman as a particularly local character flaw drew my notice.

Gord Stellick identified Vancouver's reaction more correctly on XM Home Ice Thursday afternoon as a progression of a perverse new hockey tradition. His wrong turn, though, came in wondering why fans in Anaheim, Carolina and Tampa [sic] had booed Bettman too — paraphrasing, "after all, he's why those teams are there! This whole southern team idea, that's a Bettman thing!"1

It's easy to get things wrong mid-rant on live radio. But fact-checking is what we have the Internet for, and his recollection of pre-lockout winner Tampa in particular turning on Bettman didn't ring true to me. So, to YouTube.

As it turns out, Anaheim briefly booed Bettman's entry in 2007 with lockout wounds still fresh, but got over it quickly as he cracked a joke and announced Scott Niedermayer's Conn Smythe in the same breath.  In 2006 in Raleigh, a recorded fanfare drowned out everything until Bettman began complimenting the celebrating fans; Tampa Bay in 2004 cheered his entry. Sustained arena-wide Bettman-hate didn't get truly started until a string of road team wins: Pittsburgh's loving reaction to the Red Wings' 2008 win when Bettman inexplicably went long-form with his congratulations as the boos swelled, Detroit returning the favor to the Pens in 2009, and Philadelphia fans surprising absolutely no one in 2010 after Chicago won. In all those, post-lockout bitterness made Bettman a good outlet for team-centric frustration, no more.

What neither Stellick nor Jones could get to is that a major difference between Finals fans in Pittsburgh, Detroit and Philly on one hand and Vancouver on the other is the sports media environment they live in. On this side of the border, Gary Bettman is a sideshow we try to ignore. Up North, though, nearly two decades of Canadian media treating Bettman as Canada's Emmanuel Goldstein shapes their behavior. That makes it hard to tell how much of Wednesday night's explosive hatred was Vancouver and how much was a psychosis all of Canada needs to own.

1. Speaking of getting things wrong: The Ducks and Lightning predate Bettman, and Carolina is there because Pete Karmanos (a) bid too low in 1990 for the Tampa Bay expansion franchise that became the Lightning, (b) found the Research Triangle to be on a better economic trajectory than Columbus, Ohio, the other place with a promising arena project in 1997, and (c) once he moved the club, had his sizable ego invested in making hockey work where he had damn well put it.

If you haven't been following the series, it took exactly one game for Bruins fans to work up a Canadiens-level hatred for the Canucks. This was surprising because Vancouver isn't Tampa Bay, Columbus, or any of those other microwavable insta-Bettman hockey cities that any Original Six fan base instinctively hates.

Reading Simmons on hockey fandom is a terrible idea, because hockey most of all brings out the caricature in him.

He knows the NBA, NFL and Major League Baseball (well, at least the AL East), his attempts at soccer commentary are so transparently dumb they're easy to dismiss, and he mostly stays away from college sports. When hockey comes up, though, he's not quite bad enough to ignore, but neither does he know nor respect the game enough to offer good ideas.

That leaves material that, were it within the hockey bubble, would be easy to file away as an irrelevant hybrid of Don Cherry-ism and less-knowledgeable NYT-style Original Six trolling. Since non-hockey people pay attention to Simmons, though, memes like his February 2009 gossip that 15 NHL teams would go under by mid-2011 can damage the game to the casual (i.e. front-running) sports fan.

That leads us to today, as he revels in jumping back on the Bruins bandwagon and does a couple different drive-bys on Sun Belt hockey fans in the process. The second is unintentionally revealing:

My dream scenario: two of the WTFDTCHAHT's move to Quebec and Toronto8, giving us 10 Canadian teams (I'm including Buffalo...

(8) WTFDTCHAHT stands for "Why the f--- does that city have a hockey team?" I'm looking at you, Nashville. And you too, Phoenix.

If Simmons had paid attention to hockey at all since the Predators joined the league in 1998, he'd know a couple things.

First, the Preds play more-or-less the style of hockey he turned away from. They don't exactly trap, but their team identity has always been stifling defense, and they've never been able to secure the kind of sniper that makes SportsCentre and turns a middling team into a major Cup threat. They won their first playoff series in twelve seasons this year.

That hasn't mattered, though, because Nashville's fans are loyal. Despite one duplicitous owner, another a straight-up fraud, a would-be purchaser undermining the franchise with the municipal leaseholder and local media in an attempt to move it to Ontario, and no great success on the ice, they've shown up — which is a good thing, because unlike Simmons, they don't get to quit and come back when things get better. If they bail, their team dies just like Atlanta's, and no nation of bleeding hearts will cheerlead for their second chance like Canada's decade-plus rally around Winnipeg. Instead, Simmonses will mock them as undeserving of hockey, then go back to watching the NFL and acting superior when their city's team makes an occasional run.

There's nothing inherently wrong with bandwagoning. It's an aspect of casual fandom, often the difference between a team or a sport surviving versus thriving. Hockey's biggest problem is its dearth of precisely this kind of fan. But it's off-putting for a bandwagoner with roots in an easy place to love the game to denigrate those of us walking the hard road.

Simmons gets to take hockey for granted. He can skip out for 15 years, then fly back East and pound the glass with his dad like nothing happened. But we in the South don't, and Simmons's Boston-bred ignorant superiority complex shines brightest when he recommends leaving us behind in favor of the castles he's built in the air while watching baseball.

THE CONS

Future: Putting a team in Winnipeg won’t inspire any more of the city’s top athletes to take up the sport. Removing it from Atlanta will kill youth hockey in the area. Hockey is doing a much better job of getting kids to play the game in the U.S. — just note the number of players drafted who grew up in southern California and Arizona. This would be a setback in the growth of the game.

Kevin McGran points out today in the Toronto Star why the argument that Canadians' love for hockey entitles them to take clubs from non-traditional markets is so wrongheaded, and in the processes stumbles over why the rejoicing over the league's abandonment of a Southern market is so deeply offensive.

Nobody north or south is upset over Winnipeg getting a team in and of itself -- the few arguments against have been practical. As Travis Hair pointed out in March with his Coyotes in the crosshairs, nobody rejoiced over the heartache of Jets fans in 1996. Sun Belt fans in 2011 don't get that forbearance, though -- the all-too-common refrain from north of 49 is all about how they, the very people who did support some truly pathetic offerings of NHL hockey, somehow don't deserve the opportunity to support this game.

So don't tell me that you love the sport of hockey if you celebrate its failure -- because though the popular Canadian refrain calls it Gary Bettman's comeuppance, outside that bubble this is a retreat for the sport. Hate Bettman and Barry Shenkarow all you want, but the 1996-2011 cohort of Manitoba kids didn't lack hockey inspiration in the Jets' absence, not in a country where the game is so culturally dominant. Georgia kids from 2011 forward won't have those hopes. Nor will the game as a whole have the opportunity that a winning NHL team led by Dustin Byfuglien and Evander Kane in the heart of black America would offer.  Maybe this is a victory for hockey-as-Canadian-symbol, but hockey-as-sport gets hurt here.

Winnipeg will certainly be profitable in the short term, and I hope for Jets (Moose?) fans' sake that they're able to keep their team this time around. But abandoning the ninth-largest city in the U.S. is a long-term loss, not just for the abandoned fans but for everyone who wants this game to succeed and grow. Bettman-schadenfreude doesn't justify celebrating that.

The Twitter uproar is mostly over his sudden conversion to the anti-goon position, but I was more shocked to find myself agreeing with Mike Milbury's interjection on the first topic of discussion on CBC Satellite Hotstove tonight during the second period of Leafs-Blackhawks.

Expecting balanced debate of the Phoenix Coyotes' situation on a Canadian network is folly.  But tonight's discussion was especially fact-free until Milbury inconveniently mentioned that the only way Winnipeg would work in today's NHL was with a "sugar daddy" owner willing to accept massive losses.  

Eric Francis and Pierre LeBrun (the ringleader of tonight's death-to-Phoenix movement) immediately turned on him. LeBrun asserted that the Canadian dollar wouldn't sink from its current sky-high position versus the greenback (the loonie going south contributed to the 1990s instability of not just Winnipeg and Quebec, but Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa as well), but Francis's position was perhaps the most enlightening for its hypocrisy.

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