I said on Wednesday (actually late Tuesday night) that the other shoe had dropped.
Fortunately for VT, there appear to be an infinite number of shoes, and
an only slightly smaller number of people shuffling those shoes behind
the scenes.
The message board talk of a “Breakaway Big East” or “B.A.B.E.”, like my New BE
from Wednesday, reached a fever pitch Thursday, even as the major media
finally
awoke to what the message boards knew Tuesday. Chas Rich (who is now decidedly
on my blogroll), has nailed
the media reactions; no need for me to duplicate his work. Out in
boardspace, the rumor mill was again cranking up, with these interesting
conditions:
- The ACC had a media blackout, but sources were blabbing anyway.
- The Big East had a rather more effective blackout, as most sources there
went silent today, with a
notable exception associated with West Virginia (but closer related to
the ACC).
- VT Athletic Director Jim Weaver was reportedly in Arizona today, of
all places.
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9 May 2003
/ Comment
/ Tags: realignment
If Tuesday’s doings on TechSideline.com
are to be believed, the other shoe
has dropped: the ACC has reportedly voted to invite Miami, Syracuse and Boston
College into the conference as a group. The question now is: what’s next?
We’ll leave aside the fact that neither SU nor BC fits very well into the ACC;
neither team is even in a geographically contiguous state to current ACC
territory! I think the Carolina boys are in for a rude awakening the first
time they try to make deals with SU and BC, schools with significantly
different histories and institutional cultures from those of their new
conference-mates. But what happens next is hard to tell.
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7 May 2003
/ Comment
/ Tags: realignment
Yesterday I posted part 1
of my discussion on college athletic conference realignment and its impact
on Tech. If you haven’t read it yet, you might want to; it gives a few
basic rules and breaks down the Big XII and Big 10, some of which I’ll
reference today as I discuss the SEC, ACC and Big East.
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30 April 2003
/ Comment
/ Tags: realignment
Two weeks ago, Big East Conference commissioner Mike Tranghese made a rather
big splash by accusing
the Atlantic Coast Conference of approaching Big East members with
proposals for them to join an expanded ACC. Thus began an annual tradition
on college athletics discussion boards, the conference realignment debate.
Each year, fans of various schools get extremely worked up over the
possibility that their school could move from one conference to another,
or that their conference could re-shuffle its membership and/or collapse
under threat from another conference. The Big East, in which Virginia
Tech currently competes, is usually at the center of these debates. I’ll
attempt to address conference realignment from a Hokie perspective. Today
is part 1, an introduction and discussion of the Big XII and Big 10;
tomorrow’s part 2 will talk about the SEC, ACC and Big East.
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29 April 2003
/ Comment
/ Tags: realignment
Tonight’s entry will be slightly different: a snapshot of what’s going on in
my apartment and inside my head, instead of an in-depth examination of one
particular idea.
So…
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22 April 2003
/ Comment
/ Tags: realignment, life