Realignment II: It Begins

Phase II of the realignment wars has begun: the five remaining football members of the Big East have sued Miami, Boston College and the ACC. (The Connecticut Attorney General’s office offers a PDF copy of the suit itself.) The five schools hired an extremely high-powered NYC law firm, and filed the lawsuit in Connecticut Superior Court. The schools’ presidents are being led by West Virginia University president David Hardesty, who is a Harvard Law School alumnus.

The only thing surprising about this suit is that it happened before the ACC made its formal invitation to the three to join. Syracuse was going to be left out of any vindictive moves by the left-behind five, as SU has appeared throughout to be a reluctant party to this mess (basketball coach Jim Boeheim has been overtly hostile to it). Connecticut has always been in the lead of legal action; UConn has the most financial exposure ($90 million), a very ambitious state Attorney General, and the worst prospects of any of the five, as their I-A football program is just two years old.

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Quick Hits, 5 June

Yeah, I haven’t posted in a while. Work’s been getting busier, and I spent much of last weekend on a totally extracurricular coding project. The fruit of that project, though, is that once again you can AIM hawkeye5Cell to send me a (free) text message on my cell phone. AOL and SunCom don’t have their act together yet on the real AIM forwarding service to GSM phones, so I wrote a Java client using a couple of third-party libraries for the AOL and SMTP interfaces. Eventually I will release this app to the public, but I need to:

• debug re-connecting after a connection drops
• move configuration options from hard-coded Strings into an XML file
• figure out how to properly build a standalone JAR file using Ant — I’ve got web-apps down, but basic JARs not so much
• resolve licensing dilemmas, which may require me to rewrite the SMTP library so the whole app can be GPL’d, in line with Jaimlib

A few column thoughts have crossed my mind over the last week, but I don’t think any qualified for a full column on their own. Judge for yourself, though.

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Realignment: Slamming The Door

This will be my final article on conference realignment for now. The main reason is that I don’t think anything else is likely to happen in the near term but postmortems, and maybe the invitation of Pitt into the Big Ten. The other reason is that, while I’ve managed to draw some good traffic over this issue, I need to shut the rage machine down for a while. I’ll resurrect the travel series I started before first the Iraq war, then the conference wars broke out.

It’s a done deal. Tuesday, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the annual Big East meetings ended a day earlier than planned. (Some indications are that today was actually the original ending day, but plans to extend the meeting were scrapped. Either way, it isn’t good.) Yesterday, Big East Idiot-In-Charge Commissioner Mike Tranghese held a rambling press conference where he blasted Miami, then indicated that he basically didn’t have a clue what to do next. In another article (sorry, no link), he claimed that Notre Dame had been approached for a second time regarding football membership and had again rejected BE overtures. Although formalities will take a while, Tranghese’s last statement, “[M]y five football schools, and my five basketball schools and Notre Dame are going to have to do something if this occurs,” seems to say that he’s resigned to the departure of Miami, SU, and BC.

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Realignment: Tech Stabbed In The Back

The ACC has officially extended invitations to Miami, Syracuse and Boston College. Virginia Tech fans must now pray for a miracle that can only be delivered by Notre Dame or a friendly television network.

Miami needs money, and in the end, Virginia Gov. Mark Warner’s political pressure came to naught: both North Carolina and Duke reversed their original NO votes, leaving UVa as the sole opponent and carrying non-VT expansion by an 8-1 vote (with seven votes required).

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Realignment: The Final Movement

The fat lady has not yet sung for Virginia Tech athletics, but the symphony has reached its final movement. Conductor John Swofford is cueing her to stand, and the green-and-orange, baby-blue and garnet-and-gold clad fat cats are already envisioning the spread at the post-concert reception.

At about 5:40 PM Tuesday, news broke from ACC meetings in Amelia Island, FL that the ACC had voted to expand, taking Miami, Syracuse and either Boston College or Virginia Tech. Only Virginia was referred to as “requesting” BC instead of VT; on the other side, Florida State board of trustees chairman John Thrasher was quoted as wanting BC, and it is known that Miami and likely North Carolina prefer BC over VT as well.

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