This article is dedicated to Bryan from Drunken Zombie.
There has been much clamor over the past year about the inevitability of four 16 team Super Conferences. In the past year, teams like Nebraska, Colorado, and Texas A&M have all switched conferences signaling the start of a major change in college athletics as history and tradition are jettisoned for greener pa$tures. The ultimate endgame of all this is that when the four super conferences are created, they will then opt out of the NCAA (A lot of people don’t know that the NCAA is a volunteer organization in that, the schools voluntarily allow it to police them and can snap their fingers and say “Fuck your sanctions” if they have 63 other schools having their back), keep all the money themselves, and get that playoff we all want started.
The driving force behind all of this is football. Or at least, that’s what we’ve all thought. But with the recent announcement that Syracuse and Pittsburgh are leaving the Big East for the ACC, and the new report today that the ACC is trying to round out its roster with Connecticut and Rutgers, the first conference to actively try to get a full 16 teams is the one conference nobody really regards as a football power. Pitt, Syracuse, and Connecticut, the two latter moreso than the former, are basketball powers. The ACC, of course, is home to North Carolina and Duke, and by extension has always been viewed as primarily a “basketball conference”. That’s not to say that the ACC is a chump when it comes to football, just that Florida State and Miami have been down the past decade and Virginia Tech for all their success, just isn’t a sexy program that garners the kind of respect that the ACC basketball schools command.
So I find it really interesting that the first conference to be proactive in getting 16 teams (the others have flirted with it in football, but have been afraid to pull the trigger) is a basketball conference. Make no mistake, Pitt, Syracuse, Uconn, and Rutgers are not scaring the likes of FSU, VaTech, or Miami. If anything, the football programs are gleeful. Why? Because the in conference football schedule gets decidedly easier allowing the big teams in the ACC to have a better shot at big bowl games and National Championships, while the basketball aspect of the ACC gets insanely stronger. Not only that, but it successfully stifles any attempt by the SEC to poach teams from the ACC and gives a big middle finger to Texas and their Longhorn Network.
Basketball has become the trigger that starts knocking the dominoes over, not football. As a devoted lover of all things basketball (way more than football), I find this to be an interesting angle of discussion in this football dominated world. I’ll be interested to see if the talking heads on ESPN bring this up at all during the next week or so.
Other thoughts
- What happens with Kansas when the Big 12 dissolves? My guess would be that the Big 10 will pick up Missouri and Kansas. Missouri is mid-tier successful in football and basketball, but Kansas is an all-time basketball program. That would be like Kentucky not having a conference. I would think that the Big 10 would jump on the chance to bring an all-time basketball program like Kansas into themselves because honestly, the Big 10 just isn’t a basketball power now that Indiana is nothing.
- Will Notre Dame be forced into joining a conference? Notre Dame places an unusually high importance on tradition. They’ve been basically playing the same schedule for a thousand years. But conference re-alignment is going to blow up a lot of their famous schedule and rivalries. ND is independent in football, but their basketball team is a member of the Big East, which is dissolving before their eyes. Would the Big 10 let ND in and give them a special exemption to keep that phat NBC tv contract? I don’t think so. ND is in a tough position.
- Who will the SEC add? West Virginia? Assuming that the ACC’s new 16 team conference holds together, who in the world is the SEC gonna go after? Texas would be the most prestigious, of course, but that Longhorn Network is a deal breaker in terms of a recruiting edge. Do they take a run at Missouri? It’s hard to see what “big time” splashy choices would be left for them to choose from. If they could make Texas their bitch and force their will on the Longhorns, that would certainly be something. But doesn’t it feel like the SEC, the most powerful conference in America, might be getting sloppy seconds? The ACC sorta punked them here.
- Oh, and poor, poor TCU. Those guys got fcked.
Filed under: Commentary, sports, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
