SWC75
Bored Historian
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In the late 70’s I looked at a list of major college football programs and saw that the following schools were all independents and all located along the eastern seaboard: Boston College, Syracuse, Penn State, Pittsburgh, West Virginia, Virginia Tech, South Carolina, Georgia Tech, Florida State and Miami. The Pacific Coast Conference had recently expanded from being the Pac 8 to the Pac 10 and I realized that we had a potential Atlantic 10 right there. A bunch of northern schools that loved to recruit southern basketball players and southern schools who love to recruit northern basketball players. (Miami had recently given up basketball but they would be persuaded to resume as they later did when they joined the Big East.) I was so excited about the idea I even wrote into the SU Athletic Department and the local paper to suggest it. But nothing ever came of it.
An alternative to that would have been to do was has been rumored since the 1950’s: create an eastern conference among the independents that were playing each other all the time anyway: Army, Navy, Boston College, Syracuse, Penn State, Pittsburgh, West Virginia and maybe the two newbies, Rutgers and Temple, who had been playing at what would now be called a 1AA or FCS level but were aggressively trying to break into the top group in the late 70’s. Nine teams is actually the perfect size for a conference, (you play 8 conference games: four home and four away and play everyone twice in basketball: 8 home and 8 away). But if you wanted 10 you could add in Virginia Tech- if you couldn’t get Notre Dame, of course. BC, SU, Pitt and West Virginia played good basketball. It would have been a decent conference in that sport but not the gauntlet the Big East became. Eventually schools like Cincinnati and Louisville or Connecticut could have been added to bring it to 12 so we could have had a championship game and that would have made it a powerful basketball conference. Meanwhile the (big-time) basketball- only schools of the northeast could create their own conference: some combination of Holy Cross, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Providence, St. John’s, Seton Hall, Georgetown, Villanova, St. Joseph’s, LaSalle, Duquesne and St. Bonaventure could have formed a conference of their own. There could have been a certain number of non-conference games between the two conferences or even an annual “challenge”. But that didn’t happen either.
Instead, there were two attempts to create basketball-only conferences. The first the “Eastern Eight”, consisted of Villanova, Duquesne, Penn State, West Virginia, George Washington, Massachusetts, Pittsburgh, and Rutgers. This group eventually morphed into the Atlantic 10, which now has only three of those teams. Some other eastern schools weren’t quite ready to take the plunge and later formed the Big East, which initially had Providence, St. John’s Georgetown, Syracuse, Seton Hall, Connecticut and Boston College. Villanova joined in 1980 and Pittsburgh in 1982 to make it a seemingly perfect 9 team league. But one thing was not perfect. Boston College, Syracuse and Pittsburgh were big-time football schools and the others weren’t. And football, as they say, drives the bus in college sports. It created a critical cleavage in the conference that would eventually lead to its demise.
Through the 80’s it was a great conference, not only powerful, (the only conference to get three teams into a Final Four: Six of nine schools made it that far in the decade, four played for the title and two won it), but with everybody playing each other twice, often a third time in New York for the conference tournament and sometimes a fourth time in the NCAAs, there was an intimacy to the conference that fueled the rivalries. Fans of each team knew every player on the other team and the games were like a “family feud”. And the conference represented the northeastern section of the country, (still the most populous) on the national scene. We had no national champions from LaSalle’s win in 1954 until Georgetown in 1984 and suddenly we were having someone challenge for the title every year. The Big East, helped by ESPN, put us on the map.
But the basketball teams of the conference refused to allow Penn State in. They were the football powerhouse of the east but mediocre, at best, in basketball and they didn’t represent an urban area so the TV market wasn’t there. The Nittany Lions demanded that their traditional rivals in the Big East leave the conference for a new conference Joe Paterno wanted to set up. When they declined, Joe asked them to schedule 2 out of 3 football games in Happy Valley instead of a simple home and home series, to make up for the basketball revenue they weren’t getting. That received the same response and the Lions bolted for the Big Ten.
That left eastern football without its crown jewel and increased the likelihood that the remaining eastern football schools might seek other conference affiliations. To hold onto its football playing members, the Big East formed a football conference consisting of Boston College, Syracuse, Rutgers, Temple, Pittsburgh, West Virginia, Virginia Tech and Miami. I remember thinking that this was an opportunity to create something similar to my original “Atlantic 10” concept. I was disappointed we didn’t bring in Florida State, Miami’s great rival. Instead they went to the ACC, leaving Miami isolated, playing a bunch of northeastern schools. Miami vs. Temple?
Meanwhile, the basketball conference became a bloated 14 team mess. Then they added a 15th team for basketball only, Notre Dame, a school that would have solidified the appeal of the football conference but insisted they wanted to remain independent so they could continue to be “superior” to everybody in college football. Temple was not allowed to compete in basketball because Villanova, which had the Philadelphia market, refused to share it with them. It said something that the Big East wanted Temple’s football program, (which had become a laughingstock after their 70’s success peaked), but not their nationally ranked basketball program. The intimacy that had made the conference special was gone. Schedules became nightmare to put together. Single games against conferences rivals almost had the feel of non-conference games. The conference was still powerful but was less of a conference than a collection of teams.
But the football conference matured and improved. At first it seemed Miami would totally own it but Virginia Tech, Syracuse and West Virginia came up to challenge the Canes and sometimes beat them. Eastern schools and conferences tend to be under-rated by the rest of the country but in terms of rankings, intersectional games and bowl results, the conference held its own and became one of six conferences whose champion got an automatic bid to the BCS.
But then came a bombshell: the ACC was extending invitations to Miami, Syracuse and Boston College to leave the Big East and join the ACC and accepted. The ACC had traditionally been something of a backwater in college football, more of a basketball conference with a collection of b-list football programs. Maryland won a national championship in their first year, 1953, but no one came close until Clemson broke through in 1981. The core of the conference was the North Carolina schools, UNC, NC
State, Duke and Wake Forest and they didn’t like the idea of expansion because they felt they’d lose their dominance over the conference. Maryland was often rumored to join another conference but they didn’t, it was said, because they wanted to maintain their basketball rivalry with the North Carolina schools.
The old ACC didn’t seem to be a candidate to out-maneuver anyone but this was a new ACC that had broken the grip of the North Carolina schools. The internal conflicts of the Big East prevented an effective response. What should have been done was a counter-raid to try to get ACC teams to joining the Big East, (Maryland, Georgia Tech and Clemson were rumored to be unhappy). Instead the response was simply one of anger.
Then came a second bombshell: Due to some last minute manipulation by the Governor of Virginia the ACC turned Syracuse and BC down and replace them with Virginia Tech. The Big East voted to increase their penalty for leaving the conference and have all remaining members sign pledges to stay in the conference. Two weeks later the ACC, which found the NCAA wouldn’t let them have a championship game with only 11 teams, re-invited Boston College, who immediately accepted. The Big East then put aside its outrage over being raided by raiding the Atlantic 10 and Conference USA for Cincinnati, Louisville, South Florida, DePaul and Marquette, the latter two for basketball only. Temple was booted out of lack of community support but Connecticut’s football was elevated into the conference, which now because the “wannabe” conference of schools that aspired to be big-time in football but couldn’t break into the BCS. The BCS rating of the Big East, (which can only be lost if it fails to perform at a certain level over a five year period) gave these schools a chance to be big time. Those schools spent a lot of money on facility upgrades in the effort and this created a round of upgrades and new projects among conference schools. If you had anything that wasn’t built in this century, it seemed old-fashioned and was a recruiting liability, even if it was still functional.
Amazingly these new schools, along with one old one going into its best stretch ever, (West Virginia), kept the Big East above water. Using James Howell’s ratings, (see below), the Big East was the 6th best conference in 2005, then 2-3-4-2-6-5-5 through 2012 while the ACC went 3-6-6-2-5-5-6-6. In the BCS Bowls, West Virginia beat Georgia 38-35, Louisville beat Wake Forest 24-13, West Virginia beat Oklahoma 48-28, Cincinnati lost to Virginia Tech 7-20 and Florida 24-51, Connecticut lost to Oklahoma 20-48, West Virginia swamped Clemson 70-33 and Louisville beat Florida 33-23. The Wannabes were being just fine.
But the bonds of the conference were weak. It seems strange to want to expand beyond 12 teams, (the schedule becomes more difficult to put together), but there is more money to be made from the TV networks if you add more TV markets, (especially if you own your own network). So the A CC expanded again, inviting Syracuse and Pittsburgh. If we had said no to that, it surely would have been Pittsburgh and someone else, (probably Rutgers, since BC didn’t want to share New England with Connecticut). In fact, it might have been anyway but for the Carrier Dome and SU’s promise to play some games in New York. So we jumped. The Big East simply unraveled after that. The basketball schools had had enough and exited, creating a new conference called the “Catholic Seven”, since they were all Catholic schools. They invited Xavier, Creighton and Butler, (who is not a Catholic school), to join them. The remaining football schools morphed into the “American Athletic Conference” and invited Houston, Memphis, SMU, Temple, Central Florida, East Carolina, Tulane, Tulsa and Navy to join. It was basically Conference USA but retained the Big East’s BCS automatic qualification- for now. Syracuse wanted no part of this hodge-podge and is very glad to be in a conference full of schools that have been playing big-time football for decades.
Still, it’s kind of disgusting that the Northeast, still the most populous area of the country, was unrepresented by a big-time football conference. I have to wonder if having separate football and basketball-only conferences as described above would have created a more stable situation: schools with similar problems and goals acting in unison. Maybe it would still be intact, except for some judicious expansion to get to 12 teams. We’ll never know.
But the expanded ACC offered some interesting possibilities. Seven of the 10 teams in my original; “Atlantic 10” idea are here: Boston College, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech, Florida State and Miami. We used to play Maryland every year and they and Virginia are frequent recruiting rivals. I was hopeful that the ACC would expand once more and bring in Connecticut, which is near New York City and is a great basketball rival and convince West Virginia to “come home”. They clearly belong in this conference, not the Big 12. And there’s speculation that the “power conferences” might someday be further reduced to four 16 team conferences with the four champions to be in a playoff. If that happened, the ACC needs to out-maneuver the Big 12 as they did the Big East because the SEC, Big 10 and Pac 10 are obviously going to take three of those slots. Taking back the Mountaineers would be a blow to the Big 12. Then, maybe we could drop the “Atlantic” and “Coastal” set up and go north-south which would give us a northern division of Boston College, Connecticut, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, West Virginia, Maryland, Virginia and Virginia Tech, which would somewhat resemble the Big East, (certainly moreso than the AAC) . The schools would all be natural geographic and recruiting rivals and would represent the Northeast as the Northern Division of the Atlantic Coast Conference.
Except the ACC doesn’t want to change divisions. And Boston College doesn’t want Connecticut in. And Maryland jumped to the Big Ten, (despite those North Carolina rivalries they were supposed to love). And then the ACC announced the same deal with Notre Dame the Big East had with them: they will house all the non-football programs the Fighting Leaches have and give them a bowl spot in exchange for a certain number of games with them while Notre Dame retains its football independence and sense of superiority. That gives the conference 15 basketball schools and would give it 17 if they further expanded. The ACC gets Notre Dame’s “brand” but not their football, which created the brand. At least
the conference managed to convince Louisville to replace Maryland and that’s a net gain. The Cardinals just won the NCAA basketball title and their athletic department made more money that anyone in the conference except Notre Dame’s, so they have the potential to be a perennial power in both sports.
Hopefully the roulette wheel of college football has stopped turning for a while and we can settle down to our new situation and begin establishing, (or continuing or renewing) the rivalries that are the life-blood of the sport. The question now becomes how do we stack up to our new conference bretheren, and not just this year but for the foreseeable future. I’ve done a study of how these 14 teams have done over the last 33 seasons, (since the Carrier Dome opened). That period includes multiple ups and downs for all the schools and should give us a general picture of how they will fare in the future. I needed a ranking of all the major college teams for each season from 1980 onward. There are several sources available on the internet for that but I’ll use this one since I’m used to using it for other projects:
http://www.jhowell.net/cf/cfindex.htm
You can argue with some of the rankings but you can do the same with all similar sources. I just needed someone who had done such a ranking and didn’t feel that the overall results would be substantially different with a different source. I averaged up Howell’s ranking for each of the 33 years for each school. I also looked at the range of rankings, how many top ten teams they had, (per Howell), how many “conference titles”, (meaning that Howell ranked them the highest of the 14 teams that year), and how many times Syracuse had been ranked higher than that schools team in a particular year. Here are the results:
The average ranking, (by Howell):
Florida State 14.03 range: 1-44 top 10s: 16 conference “titles”: 9 SU was better: 1 time
Miami 19.67 range: 1-73 top 10s: 16 conference “titles”: 10 SU was better: 5 times
Virginia Tech 26.33 range: 3-78 top 10s: 6 conference “titles”: 1 SU was better: 10 times
Clemson 29.09 range: 1-81 top 10s: 3 conference “titles”: 1 SU was better: 10 times
Boston College 44.55 range: 6-108 top 10s: 1 conference “titles”: 1 SU was better: 15 times
Georgia Tech 47.33 range: 1-118 top 10s: 1 conference “titles”: 1 SU was better: 17 times
North Carolina 47.79 range: 5-99 top 10s: 4 conference “titles”: 0 SU was better: 18 times
Pittsburgh 48.33 range: 1-99 top 10: 3 conference “titles”: 2 SU was better: 16 times
Syracuse 48.48 range: 4-109 top 10s: 2 conference “titles”: 0
Virginia 50.21 range: 13-120 top 10s: 0 conference “titles”: 0 SU was better: 18 times
North Carolina State 50.76 range: 12-90 top 10s: 0 conference “titles”: 0 SU was better: 18 times
Louisville 57.88 range: 21-105 top 10s: 2 conference “titles”: 2 SU was better: 18 times
Wake Forest 69.61 range: 21-108 top 10s: 0 conference “titles”: 0 SU was better: 22 times
Duke 81.21 range: 27-116 top 10s: 0 conference “titles”: 0 SU was better: 25 times
I see four strata here:
Florida State and Miami are the true powerhouses, capable of being regular contenders for the national championship when not held back by probation. Miami is down now but we’ve seen several examples of dormant powerhouses rising again in recent history: Oklahoma, USC, Alabama, even Miami itself after their troubles in the late 90’s. Florida State has slowly been building back up and the Noles are perhaps just a notch below what they once were. South Florida will get knocked down a peg being in the sinking ship that is the former Big East football conference. That will help both these schools. When they are on their game, they will be the class of the conference.
Virginia Tech and Clemson are on the next level. The Hokies have been better at their best but the Tigers have been consistently good the entire 33 years. Louisville is currently in the next group but I think that is deceiving. They are a powerhouse athletic department, making tons of money right now. The school is in SEC country but also close to prime recruiting areas in Ohio and Pennsylvania. I don’t see them rising to the Florida State/Miami level for the next 33 years but I think they will be on a par with Virginia Tech and Clemson.
Then comes what I will call the “elevator bank” teams. They represent the middle of the conference and will be up and down. In good years they might be on the second tier. In a dream year they might be on the first tier. But they will be up and down. Their games against each other should be very competitive and they will occasionally pull off an upset over a higher tiered school. Some years it won’t be an upset. But they are not going to be dominant programs or regular contenders. They are Boston College, Georgia Tech, North Carolina, Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Virginia and North Carolina State. (Maybe we can finally beat the Wolfpack: we are 0-6 against them all time.)
The bottom feeders will be Wake Forest and Duke. The Deacons have had their moments in recent years and Grobe is a good coach but I don’t think they can sustain it.
Here are our all-time records against the 16 schools:
Boston College 28-18
Clemson 1-0
Duke 0-2 (the last in 1939)
Florida State 1-5
Georgia Tech 0-2
Louisville 6-6
Miami 7-15
North Carolina 2-2
North Carolina State 0-6
Pittsburgh 31-34-3
Virginia 2-2
Virginia Tech 9-8
Wake Forest 1-1
TOTAL 88-101-3
Can we compete in the ACC? I think so. That doesn’t tell me how much we will win there or how often we will compete for a title. It may help that the conference is split into divisions. We could have a year when we are strong but the division is weak. If we can get to the conference title game, that’s one game and if we got there, we are good enough to win it. I think it’s a conference that will be very tough on struggling teams, much like the basketball Big East, (or the basketball ACC), where even a pretty good team could get pounded down playing someone each week who can beat them if they don’t play well. It will be quite a challenge but we need to keep the legs pumping to keep our heads above water.
Of course, if we can get back to the level we were in the McNabb Era, we will be more than just competitive. We’ll be regular contenders for the division and even the conference title. But Pittsburgh could say the same thing about the Dorsett-Marino Era and BC could say it about the Doug Flutie Era. Louisville could say it about the Bobby Petrino Era, Virginia about the George Welch Era, North Carolina about the Lawrence Taylor and Mack Brown Eras, NC State about when Lou Holtz was their coach, Duke about Wallace Wade and Georgia Tech about Bobby Dodd. But these schools have not shown the ability to sustain excellence, (at least not in the Two Platoon Era) and they probably won’t in the future.
I do think it’s important to have at least a decent first year. We are trying to establish ourselves in new recruiting areas, (or, at least establish ourselves in a bigger way). These are teenagers, (to whom Donovan McNabb is some old guy and our other heroes are ancient history), we will be recruiting and you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. If we tank this year, they will tend to see us as bottom feeders and we will be their last choice or close to it. If we can at least break even in the conference, we will be seen as a viable option- and we will be one.
An alternative to that would have been to do was has been rumored since the 1950’s: create an eastern conference among the independents that were playing each other all the time anyway: Army, Navy, Boston College, Syracuse, Penn State, Pittsburgh, West Virginia and maybe the two newbies, Rutgers and Temple, who had been playing at what would now be called a 1AA or FCS level but were aggressively trying to break into the top group in the late 70’s. Nine teams is actually the perfect size for a conference, (you play 8 conference games: four home and four away and play everyone twice in basketball: 8 home and 8 away). But if you wanted 10 you could add in Virginia Tech- if you couldn’t get Notre Dame, of course. BC, SU, Pitt and West Virginia played good basketball. It would have been a decent conference in that sport but not the gauntlet the Big East became. Eventually schools like Cincinnati and Louisville or Connecticut could have been added to bring it to 12 so we could have had a championship game and that would have made it a powerful basketball conference. Meanwhile the (big-time) basketball- only schools of the northeast could create their own conference: some combination of Holy Cross, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Providence, St. John’s, Seton Hall, Georgetown, Villanova, St. Joseph’s, LaSalle, Duquesne and St. Bonaventure could have formed a conference of their own. There could have been a certain number of non-conference games between the two conferences or even an annual “challenge”. But that didn’t happen either.
Instead, there were two attempts to create basketball-only conferences. The first the “Eastern Eight”, consisted of Villanova, Duquesne, Penn State, West Virginia, George Washington, Massachusetts, Pittsburgh, and Rutgers. This group eventually morphed into the Atlantic 10, which now has only three of those teams. Some other eastern schools weren’t quite ready to take the plunge and later formed the Big East, which initially had Providence, St. John’s Georgetown, Syracuse, Seton Hall, Connecticut and Boston College. Villanova joined in 1980 and Pittsburgh in 1982 to make it a seemingly perfect 9 team league. But one thing was not perfect. Boston College, Syracuse and Pittsburgh were big-time football schools and the others weren’t. And football, as they say, drives the bus in college sports. It created a critical cleavage in the conference that would eventually lead to its demise.
Through the 80’s it was a great conference, not only powerful, (the only conference to get three teams into a Final Four: Six of nine schools made it that far in the decade, four played for the title and two won it), but with everybody playing each other twice, often a third time in New York for the conference tournament and sometimes a fourth time in the NCAAs, there was an intimacy to the conference that fueled the rivalries. Fans of each team knew every player on the other team and the games were like a “family feud”. And the conference represented the northeastern section of the country, (still the most populous) on the national scene. We had no national champions from LaSalle’s win in 1954 until Georgetown in 1984 and suddenly we were having someone challenge for the title every year. The Big East, helped by ESPN, put us on the map.
But the basketball teams of the conference refused to allow Penn State in. They were the football powerhouse of the east but mediocre, at best, in basketball and they didn’t represent an urban area so the TV market wasn’t there. The Nittany Lions demanded that their traditional rivals in the Big East leave the conference for a new conference Joe Paterno wanted to set up. When they declined, Joe asked them to schedule 2 out of 3 football games in Happy Valley instead of a simple home and home series, to make up for the basketball revenue they weren’t getting. That received the same response and the Lions bolted for the Big Ten.
That left eastern football without its crown jewel and increased the likelihood that the remaining eastern football schools might seek other conference affiliations. To hold onto its football playing members, the Big East formed a football conference consisting of Boston College, Syracuse, Rutgers, Temple, Pittsburgh, West Virginia, Virginia Tech and Miami. I remember thinking that this was an opportunity to create something similar to my original “Atlantic 10” concept. I was disappointed we didn’t bring in Florida State, Miami’s great rival. Instead they went to the ACC, leaving Miami isolated, playing a bunch of northeastern schools. Miami vs. Temple?
Meanwhile, the basketball conference became a bloated 14 team mess. Then they added a 15th team for basketball only, Notre Dame, a school that would have solidified the appeal of the football conference but insisted they wanted to remain independent so they could continue to be “superior” to everybody in college football. Temple was not allowed to compete in basketball because Villanova, which had the Philadelphia market, refused to share it with them. It said something that the Big East wanted Temple’s football program, (which had become a laughingstock after their 70’s success peaked), but not their nationally ranked basketball program. The intimacy that had made the conference special was gone. Schedules became nightmare to put together. Single games against conferences rivals almost had the feel of non-conference games. The conference was still powerful but was less of a conference than a collection of teams.
But the football conference matured and improved. At first it seemed Miami would totally own it but Virginia Tech, Syracuse and West Virginia came up to challenge the Canes and sometimes beat them. Eastern schools and conferences tend to be under-rated by the rest of the country but in terms of rankings, intersectional games and bowl results, the conference held its own and became one of six conferences whose champion got an automatic bid to the BCS.
But then came a bombshell: the ACC was extending invitations to Miami, Syracuse and Boston College to leave the Big East and join the ACC and accepted. The ACC had traditionally been something of a backwater in college football, more of a basketball conference with a collection of b-list football programs. Maryland won a national championship in their first year, 1953, but no one came close until Clemson broke through in 1981. The core of the conference was the North Carolina schools, UNC, NC
State, Duke and Wake Forest and they didn’t like the idea of expansion because they felt they’d lose their dominance over the conference. Maryland was often rumored to join another conference but they didn’t, it was said, because they wanted to maintain their basketball rivalry with the North Carolina schools.
The old ACC didn’t seem to be a candidate to out-maneuver anyone but this was a new ACC that had broken the grip of the North Carolina schools. The internal conflicts of the Big East prevented an effective response. What should have been done was a counter-raid to try to get ACC teams to joining the Big East, (Maryland, Georgia Tech and Clemson were rumored to be unhappy). Instead the response was simply one of anger.
Then came a second bombshell: Due to some last minute manipulation by the Governor of Virginia the ACC turned Syracuse and BC down and replace them with Virginia Tech. The Big East voted to increase their penalty for leaving the conference and have all remaining members sign pledges to stay in the conference. Two weeks later the ACC, which found the NCAA wouldn’t let them have a championship game with only 11 teams, re-invited Boston College, who immediately accepted. The Big East then put aside its outrage over being raided by raiding the Atlantic 10 and Conference USA for Cincinnati, Louisville, South Florida, DePaul and Marquette, the latter two for basketball only. Temple was booted out of lack of community support but Connecticut’s football was elevated into the conference, which now because the “wannabe” conference of schools that aspired to be big-time in football but couldn’t break into the BCS. The BCS rating of the Big East, (which can only be lost if it fails to perform at a certain level over a five year period) gave these schools a chance to be big time. Those schools spent a lot of money on facility upgrades in the effort and this created a round of upgrades and new projects among conference schools. If you had anything that wasn’t built in this century, it seemed old-fashioned and was a recruiting liability, even if it was still functional.
Amazingly these new schools, along with one old one going into its best stretch ever, (West Virginia), kept the Big East above water. Using James Howell’s ratings, (see below), the Big East was the 6th best conference in 2005, then 2-3-4-2-6-5-5 through 2012 while the ACC went 3-6-6-2-5-5-6-6. In the BCS Bowls, West Virginia beat Georgia 38-35, Louisville beat Wake Forest 24-13, West Virginia beat Oklahoma 48-28, Cincinnati lost to Virginia Tech 7-20 and Florida 24-51, Connecticut lost to Oklahoma 20-48, West Virginia swamped Clemson 70-33 and Louisville beat Florida 33-23. The Wannabes were being just fine.
But the bonds of the conference were weak. It seems strange to want to expand beyond 12 teams, (the schedule becomes more difficult to put together), but there is more money to be made from the TV networks if you add more TV markets, (especially if you own your own network). So the A CC expanded again, inviting Syracuse and Pittsburgh. If we had said no to that, it surely would have been Pittsburgh and someone else, (probably Rutgers, since BC didn’t want to share New England with Connecticut). In fact, it might have been anyway but for the Carrier Dome and SU’s promise to play some games in New York. So we jumped. The Big East simply unraveled after that. The basketball schools had had enough and exited, creating a new conference called the “Catholic Seven”, since they were all Catholic schools. They invited Xavier, Creighton and Butler, (who is not a Catholic school), to join them. The remaining football schools morphed into the “American Athletic Conference” and invited Houston, Memphis, SMU, Temple, Central Florida, East Carolina, Tulane, Tulsa and Navy to join. It was basically Conference USA but retained the Big East’s BCS automatic qualification- for now. Syracuse wanted no part of this hodge-podge and is very glad to be in a conference full of schools that have been playing big-time football for decades.
Still, it’s kind of disgusting that the Northeast, still the most populous area of the country, was unrepresented by a big-time football conference. I have to wonder if having separate football and basketball-only conferences as described above would have created a more stable situation: schools with similar problems and goals acting in unison. Maybe it would still be intact, except for some judicious expansion to get to 12 teams. We’ll never know.
But the expanded ACC offered some interesting possibilities. Seven of the 10 teams in my original; “Atlantic 10” idea are here: Boston College, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech, Florida State and Miami. We used to play Maryland every year and they and Virginia are frequent recruiting rivals. I was hopeful that the ACC would expand once more and bring in Connecticut, which is near New York City and is a great basketball rival and convince West Virginia to “come home”. They clearly belong in this conference, not the Big 12. And there’s speculation that the “power conferences” might someday be further reduced to four 16 team conferences with the four champions to be in a playoff. If that happened, the ACC needs to out-maneuver the Big 12 as they did the Big East because the SEC, Big 10 and Pac 10 are obviously going to take three of those slots. Taking back the Mountaineers would be a blow to the Big 12. Then, maybe we could drop the “Atlantic” and “Coastal” set up and go north-south which would give us a northern division of Boston College, Connecticut, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, West Virginia, Maryland, Virginia and Virginia Tech, which would somewhat resemble the Big East, (certainly moreso than the AAC) . The schools would all be natural geographic and recruiting rivals and would represent the Northeast as the Northern Division of the Atlantic Coast Conference.
Except the ACC doesn’t want to change divisions. And Boston College doesn’t want Connecticut in. And Maryland jumped to the Big Ten, (despite those North Carolina rivalries they were supposed to love). And then the ACC announced the same deal with Notre Dame the Big East had with them: they will house all the non-football programs the Fighting Leaches have and give them a bowl spot in exchange for a certain number of games with them while Notre Dame retains its football independence and sense of superiority. That gives the conference 15 basketball schools and would give it 17 if they further expanded. The ACC gets Notre Dame’s “brand” but not their football, which created the brand. At least
the conference managed to convince Louisville to replace Maryland and that’s a net gain. The Cardinals just won the NCAA basketball title and their athletic department made more money that anyone in the conference except Notre Dame’s, so they have the potential to be a perennial power in both sports.
Hopefully the roulette wheel of college football has stopped turning for a while and we can settle down to our new situation and begin establishing, (or continuing or renewing) the rivalries that are the life-blood of the sport. The question now becomes how do we stack up to our new conference bretheren, and not just this year but for the foreseeable future. I’ve done a study of how these 14 teams have done over the last 33 seasons, (since the Carrier Dome opened). That period includes multiple ups and downs for all the schools and should give us a general picture of how they will fare in the future. I needed a ranking of all the major college teams for each season from 1980 onward. There are several sources available on the internet for that but I’ll use this one since I’m used to using it for other projects:
http://www.jhowell.net/cf/cfindex.htm
You can argue with some of the rankings but you can do the same with all similar sources. I just needed someone who had done such a ranking and didn’t feel that the overall results would be substantially different with a different source. I averaged up Howell’s ranking for each of the 33 years for each school. I also looked at the range of rankings, how many top ten teams they had, (per Howell), how many “conference titles”, (meaning that Howell ranked them the highest of the 14 teams that year), and how many times Syracuse had been ranked higher than that schools team in a particular year. Here are the results:
The average ranking, (by Howell):
Florida State 14.03 range: 1-44 top 10s: 16 conference “titles”: 9 SU was better: 1 time
Miami 19.67 range: 1-73 top 10s: 16 conference “titles”: 10 SU was better: 5 times
Virginia Tech 26.33 range: 3-78 top 10s: 6 conference “titles”: 1 SU was better: 10 times
Clemson 29.09 range: 1-81 top 10s: 3 conference “titles”: 1 SU was better: 10 times
Boston College 44.55 range: 6-108 top 10s: 1 conference “titles”: 1 SU was better: 15 times
Georgia Tech 47.33 range: 1-118 top 10s: 1 conference “titles”: 1 SU was better: 17 times
North Carolina 47.79 range: 5-99 top 10s: 4 conference “titles”: 0 SU was better: 18 times
Pittsburgh 48.33 range: 1-99 top 10: 3 conference “titles”: 2 SU was better: 16 times
Syracuse 48.48 range: 4-109 top 10s: 2 conference “titles”: 0
Virginia 50.21 range: 13-120 top 10s: 0 conference “titles”: 0 SU was better: 18 times
North Carolina State 50.76 range: 12-90 top 10s: 0 conference “titles”: 0 SU was better: 18 times
Louisville 57.88 range: 21-105 top 10s: 2 conference “titles”: 2 SU was better: 18 times
Wake Forest 69.61 range: 21-108 top 10s: 0 conference “titles”: 0 SU was better: 22 times
Duke 81.21 range: 27-116 top 10s: 0 conference “titles”: 0 SU was better: 25 times
I see four strata here:
Florida State and Miami are the true powerhouses, capable of being regular contenders for the national championship when not held back by probation. Miami is down now but we’ve seen several examples of dormant powerhouses rising again in recent history: Oklahoma, USC, Alabama, even Miami itself after their troubles in the late 90’s. Florida State has slowly been building back up and the Noles are perhaps just a notch below what they once were. South Florida will get knocked down a peg being in the sinking ship that is the former Big East football conference. That will help both these schools. When they are on their game, they will be the class of the conference.
Virginia Tech and Clemson are on the next level. The Hokies have been better at their best but the Tigers have been consistently good the entire 33 years. Louisville is currently in the next group but I think that is deceiving. They are a powerhouse athletic department, making tons of money right now. The school is in SEC country but also close to prime recruiting areas in Ohio and Pennsylvania. I don’t see them rising to the Florida State/Miami level for the next 33 years but I think they will be on a par with Virginia Tech and Clemson.
Then comes what I will call the “elevator bank” teams. They represent the middle of the conference and will be up and down. In good years they might be on the second tier. In a dream year they might be on the first tier. But they will be up and down. Their games against each other should be very competitive and they will occasionally pull off an upset over a higher tiered school. Some years it won’t be an upset. But they are not going to be dominant programs or regular contenders. They are Boston College, Georgia Tech, North Carolina, Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Virginia and North Carolina State. (Maybe we can finally beat the Wolfpack: we are 0-6 against them all time.)
The bottom feeders will be Wake Forest and Duke. The Deacons have had their moments in recent years and Grobe is a good coach but I don’t think they can sustain it.
Here are our all-time records against the 16 schools:
Boston College 28-18
Clemson 1-0
Duke 0-2 (the last in 1939)
Florida State 1-5
Georgia Tech 0-2
Louisville 6-6
Miami 7-15
North Carolina 2-2
North Carolina State 0-6
Pittsburgh 31-34-3
Virginia 2-2
Virginia Tech 9-8
Wake Forest 1-1
TOTAL 88-101-3
Can we compete in the ACC? I think so. That doesn’t tell me how much we will win there or how often we will compete for a title. It may help that the conference is split into divisions. We could have a year when we are strong but the division is weak. If we can get to the conference title game, that’s one game and if we got there, we are good enough to win it. I think it’s a conference that will be very tough on struggling teams, much like the basketball Big East, (or the basketball ACC), where even a pretty good team could get pounded down playing someone each week who can beat them if they don’t play well. It will be quite a challenge but we need to keep the legs pumping to keep our heads above water.
Of course, if we can get back to the level we were in the McNabb Era, we will be more than just competitive. We’ll be regular contenders for the division and even the conference title. But Pittsburgh could say the same thing about the Dorsett-Marino Era and BC could say it about the Doug Flutie Era. Louisville could say it about the Bobby Petrino Era, Virginia about the George Welch Era, North Carolina about the Lawrence Taylor and Mack Brown Eras, NC State about when Lou Holtz was their coach, Duke about Wallace Wade and Georgia Tech about Bobby Dodd. But these schools have not shown the ability to sustain excellence, (at least not in the Two Platoon Era) and they probably won’t in the future.
I do think it’s important to have at least a decent first year. We are trying to establish ourselves in new recruiting areas, (or, at least establish ourselves in a bigger way). These are teenagers, (to whom Donovan McNabb is some old guy and our other heroes are ancient history), we will be recruiting and you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. If we tank this year, they will tend to see us as bottom feeders and we will be their last choice or close to it. If we can at least break even in the conference, we will be seen as a viable option- and we will be one.
