Monday, August 22, 2011

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.

mg

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think the ACC can survive. I wish they would go ahead and create the 4 super-conferences and get it over with:

The SEC:

SEC West
Arkansas
LSU
Missouri
Texas A&M

SEC Central
Alabama
Auburn
Miss. St
Ole Miss

SEC North
Kentucky
Tennessee
Vanderbilt
Louisville

SEC East
Florida
Florida St
Georgia
South Carolina

The ACC:

ACC North
Boston College
UConn
Rutgers
Syracuse

ACC Central
Maryland
Pittsburgh
Virginia Tech
West Virginia

ACC East
Duke
UNC
NC State
Virginia
Wake Forest

ACC South
Clemson
Georgia Tech
Miami
Wake Forest

The Big 10 becomes the Big 16:

Big 16 East
Cincinnati
Michigan
Ohio St
Penn St

Big 16 North
Indiana
Michigan St
Notre Dame
Purdue

Big 16 Central
Illinois
Minnesota
Northwestern
Wisconsin

Big 16 West
Iowa
Kansas
Kansas St
Nebraska

The Pac 12 becomes the Pac 16:

Pac 16 North
Oregon
Oregon St
Washington
Wash. St

Pac 16 West
Cal
Stanford
UCLA
USC

Pac 16 Central
Arizona
Arizona St
Colorado
Utah

Pac 16 East
Baylor
Oklahoma
Oklahoma St
Texas Tech

They would have to go to 11 games – 4 non-conference, your 3 division foes every year, and every team in one of the other 3 divisions. The 4 division winners would have semi-final games on campus with the 2 winners going to the title games in Atlanta, Charlotte (yes, the ACC title game should be in Charlotte permanently), Chicago and Los Angeles.

Iowa St and South Florida get left out, and have to join Conference USA.