ACC Agonistes: When football is king, all must kneel

We come here not to bury the ACC but to praise it: academic excellence; for years the most important basketball games in the world.

But times have changed, and quickly. The conference may be in its most vulnerable position since the game-fixing scandals of the early 1960s. Its football expansion has compromised the longtime ACC rivalries, introduced scandal and failed to come anywhere close to upping the league's profile. Instead, North Carolina, the league's bell cow, is awaiting the NCAA boot for a host of transgressions that stem from a concerted reach to be gridiron credible. For the fourth straight decade, Miami appears guilty of massive corruption. Hurricane football is like an infection that keeps one step ahead of antibiotics.

As the other conferences get richer and bigger from football television money, the ACC's gridiron problems have succeeded only in tarnishing the conference's gold standard -- hoops.

Where does this leave the ACC? In perilous waters, says Mark Bradley of the AJC, that's where.

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