It's Official
It’s official. The goal to which Virginia Tech athletics has aspired for fifty years has been achieved. A press conference is expected to be held Thursday, at which Virginia Tech president Dr. Charles W. Steger will accept an invitation to the Atlantic Coast Conference. Virginia Attorney General Jerry Kilgore withdrew VT and his office from the lawsuit Wednesday at 4:15 PM, and the official announcement was up on the ACC’s website by 5:20 PM.
The real key is that this offer of admission is not contingent on
what Miami does — which is good, since Miami is currently throwing a small
temper tantrum that it didn’t get to dictate its terms
and bring in its little Northern friends. For what it’s worth, I think Miami
will accept the invitation and join the ACC — but if they don’t, I honestly
don’t care. If the Big East can manage to keep UM by further selling itself
out to Miami, it can go right ahead. I want to see the BE schools do well
(well, OK, except for Boston College), but I want VT taken care of most of all.
As long as we play by the rules (which we did), everything else is secondary.
Nobody has come out of this looking good, but Virginia Tech handled itself
honestly and as well as could be expected, in what was a battle for its
athletic existence. The process was sordid, but the result for VT was right.
The RT-D’s Bob
Lipper and the Charlotte Observer’s Scott
Fowler both have made that point very clearly.
(UPDATE: even the Hartford Courant’s Jeff Jacobs,
no fan of the situation, admits
that “truth be told, they [Virginia Tech] belong in the ACC.”)
Meanwhile, according to TSL posters’ reports, retired former Roanoke Times
sports editor and noted Hokie hater Bill Brill threw
his own tantrum on Raleigh sports-talk radio this afternoon. The reactions
of the Hokie-haters, especially at TheSabre and Miami’s TheInsiders.com site,
have been the most hilarious part of the past two days — although TSL’s
Hanover Hokie’s drunken rantings of Tuesday night provided good comic relief
while waiting for word on the conference call.
So what’s going on in our new conference home? Well, down in Chapel Hill, UNC isn’t even waiting for us to join the conference before playing the scorn/superiority card (scroll to the bottom of the article). And they wonder why everyone else in the conference hates them.
But the words of some Tar Hole won’t upset me too much today. It’s a great day to be a Hokie. The road hasn’t been very scenic, but we’ve reached our destination.
25 June 2003 / 6 Comments / Tags: realignment