Realignment: "Sweet Merciful Crap!"
First, listen to Homer. I suggest loading his voice in a separate window, so you can click the Play button as necessary throughout this piece.
WVU Rivals and the Washington Post were the first to report it tentatively. Now ESPN and CBS SportsLine are reporting it as done.
Virginia Tech could be going to the ACC… as team number 13.
Before CBS and ESPN brought it out as a definite, I rated the scenarios, given that the ACC does actually expand, as: - ACC goes to 12, dumping SU for VT: 45% chance - ACC is trying to call VT’s bluff, and get VT to reject an offer so Casteen has political cover to vote yes to SU/BC/Miami: 35% chance - ACC-13 is real, and includes VT: 20% chance
Now I’m not so sure.
What is sure, though, is that VT would be absolutely foolish to reject an offer if it comes. We’d take some serious PR lumps, and probably deserve them. But too much political capital has been spent on us for us to waste it now. And even getting into a reconfigured Big East with Notre Dame as a full-time member (which is not super-likely) would be inferior to joining the conference for which we are a perfect fit geographically, culturally, academically and financially. We have high-level academic partnerships with three current members (UVa on the NoVA Center, Maryland on the vet school, and Wake Forest on a new biomedical engineering program). We are within 5 hours’ drive of 7 of the current 9 members.
We’ve been trying to get into this conference for forty years, ever since Virginia Tech’s tenth President, Walter Newman, left office. It was he who rejected the offer that seven other Southern Conference rebels made in the mid-1950s, to form a new mid-Atlantic athletic conference of like-minded institutions, with its headquarters 2 1/2 hours south of VT in Greensboro, NC. We’ve paid for that mistake with fifty years of wandering the athletic wilderness, through the dying SoCon, full independence, the Metro Conference, the Big East Football Conference, the Atlantic Ten-Or-So, and the horrendously unstable Big East.
It’s time to go home.
UPDATE, 20 June 2003: the idea of Virginia Tech having rejected the ACC in 1953 is under very strong dispute. In today’s TSL Mail, TechSideline.com’s Will Stewart writes that VT was actually left off the original invite list due to its 3-33-3 record in football from 1948 to 1951. So the cause is questionable, but the effect remains the same — the fact that we weren’t in the ACC has given us fifty years of instability.
18 June 2003 / 2 Comments / Tags: realignment