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Message: [QUOTE="sutomcat, post: 18315, member: 27"] It will be very interesting to see how scheduling is set up for the new ACC, particularly for basketball. I know one of the biggest reasons a lot of the ACC schools hated the first round of ACC raids on the Big East because it ended round robin play in basketball, which diluted long standing rivalries and deprived programs the chance to see all the other ACC schools each season at home. One would think that with 2 divisions of 7 or 8 teams, you would play round robin inside your division and 1 game a season against some portion of the other division each year, to get to a typical 16-18 game regular season. If you put all the Big East teams in the North, as expected, all the original ACC teams would get to play round robin again except UMd, UVa and Virginia Tech. Let's That should make the other schools pretty happy. And if you assume UConn gets in, UMd and UVa get to play UConn, Pitt and Syracuse at home every year. That is a heck of a way to start a home schedule...they will be able to sell tickets and keep their fanbase interested. But...I doubt that the ACC is going to do this. Why? Why else? Money. Television will not like that kind of a schedule at all. They would not be happy with a schedule where Syracuse and Duke only played once every two years (or Pitt vs UNC, or UConn vs Duke, etc., etc.). I think if the ACC wants the big increase in payout they crave, so they can be competitive (or at least somewhat competitive) with the SEC and Big Ten, they are going to have to do what the Big East has done for years...play an unbalanced schedule tailored for great TV matchups. So that in the end, even of Duke and UNC are in different divisions than Pitt and Syracuse, they are going to end up playing each other each season no matter what. Wake Forest might see Syracuse in Winston-Salem once every 8 years, and Pitt might only play G Tech in Atlanta once every 8 years, so the schedule will have that funky Big East weirdness about it, and a mediocre team that doesn't play many of the top teams may well end up winning the ACC in large part because of playing an easier schedule. I am not an ACC fan, don't know this for a fact but I bet that the ACC has already been playing unbalanced schedules, where Duke and UNC play each other home and home in basketball every season no matter what. If they don't, I am impressed and maybe the ACC won't bend scheduling to make TV happy. But I doubt it. The other thing I would love to see is for the SEC to raid the ACC and take FSU away, so there is a spot for WVU at the ACC table. I don't really care about FSU...it might hurt ACC football a little but if you crunch the numbers, I think you will find WVU has been the better football program for a while now, and they definitely have a better basketball program these days too. The best thing about having this happen is that it would set up an 8 team North Division that would be all Big East teams, except for Maryland. It would be great for traveling and I think the ACC schools, especially Virginia, would really like it too. Proposed Northern Division (assumes UConn and Rutgers gets invites) Maryland Syracuse Pittsburgh West Virginia Virginia Tech Connecticut Boston College Rutgers If I were the SEC and I could pick who I wanted (and I think that they can), I know I would pick FSU before WVU. Not because FSU has better programs right now but because it brings more eyeballs to the TVs, is more of a national school and closer to other SEC schools and is a better cultural fit than the Mountaineers. [/QUOTE]

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