Adding Members, Losing Prestige

Ending weeks of speculation and acrimony, Miami and Virginia Tech are apparently and almost officially last-ditch ditching the Big East Conference for the Atlantic Coast Conference in an extraction campaign so brazenly botched by the school presidents the postmortem analysis should be added to ACC schools’ summer-school curriculums.

“An unmitigated disaster,” one high-ranking college official said Wednesday of the expansion process.

Barring a fistfight or another last-minute snag, turncoat defection, lawsuit or teleconference, the ACC appears to have achieved its dream of expanding into a “super” conference.

The question remains: at what cost to higher education, civility and the common good?

Clemson President James F. Barker, chair of the Council of Presidents, delivered official word Wednesday that formal invitations had been extended to Miami and Virginia Tech.

Given the backwoods nature of this process, he could have made the announcement from a tree stump.

Letting go is difficult, understandably, which might explain why, as of Wednesday afternoon, a photograph of Miami quarterback Ken Dorsey still graced the Big East Web site.

Our long, national college football expansion nightmare may soon be over, yet in the end the ACC raid gave college sports a bigger sore eye than the one Lennox Lewis gave Vitali Klitschko.

In all its frothing, back-tracking and double-dealing, the ACC even forgot how to add.

The entire premise of this ACC project was to expand from nine schools to 12, then split into six-team divisions and reap the financial benefits of a football championship.

Yet, the addition of Miami and Virginia Tech gives the ACC only 11 members and NCAA rules stipulate you need 12 schools to have a football championship.

This means the ACC either will have to add another school to the mix or petition the NCAA for a rule change (you can expect the latter).

None of this has been pretty while the animus generated among schools and conferences could linger for years in the form of drunken fans holding up placards.

“I hope we mend fences because we’ve obviously gone into another person’s yard with our tractor-trailer and knocked down a few trees,” Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski told Associated Press.

A few trees?

Try a Wake Forest.

The ACC originally intended to heist Miami, Boston College and Syracuse from the Big East but was derailed by a Big East lawsuit and Virginia state politics.

The Big East, claiming the rival conference had gone behind its back, filed suit against the ACC to prevent the expansion and, yes, Virginia, Virginia Tech was one of the plaintiffs.

What happened next was Waffle-Gate. The ACC needed seven votes from its nine school presidents to approve the move. With North Carolina and Duke lined up against expansion, Virginia became the crucial swing vote. But a yes vote from Virginia would have left Virginia Tech in a depleted Big East conference and, frankly, that just wasn’t good politics for anyone running for office in Virginia.

Unable to muster a 7-2 vote, the ACC presidents decided in the 11th hour Tuesday to call an end-around, taking Miami and Virginia Tech and then giving the straight-arm to Syracuse and Boston College. Now those schools have to crawl back to a conference they, only hours ago, intended to leave.

“Syracuse University has been a proud member of the Big East,” the school announced Wednesday in a released statement. “We will work with our colleagues to help it become an even stronger conference.”

Well, given the options, bully for you.

Why is the ACC doing this?

The answers are not abundantly clear. The conference clearly is acting on the economic Darwinism Theory. The ACC thinks the future of college athletics is in larger conferences that will generate more money from television contracts and title-game revenue, although the short-term prospects indicate only a financial push in adding Miami and Virginia Tech.

The ACC, acting in its own self-preservation interests, was willing to cripple the Big East as a football conference, taking its two signature programs.

For those of you who thought college sports was all about grade-point averages and playing for the Old Oaken Bucket, well, think again.

Or, as one college official put it: “This makes us look like the money-grubbing fools that we are.”

The ACC move is sure to shake up the college landscape.

The Big East’s position as one of the six major bowl championship series conferences has been severely weakened with the loss of Miami and Virginia Tech.

Under the terms of the BCS contract, which runs through the 2005 season, the Big East champion receives one of six automatic berths to one of the four lucrative BCS bowl games -- Rose, Sugar, Fiesta and Orange. The other two BCS berths are awarded to qualifying “at-large” schools. But the Big East is in jeopardy of losing that automatic bid when Miami and Virginia Tech leave for the 2004 season.

Meanwhile, non-BCS conferences such as the Mountain West are positioning to claim the automatic BCS berth. The Mountain West recently lifted its moratorium on expansion and is expected to raid the Western Athletic Conference as it races to place itself in the new football world.

The six BCS commissioners might have to decertify the Big East and turn that sixth automatic berth into a third at-large bid. In an ironic twist, the BCS coordinator this year is Big East Commissioner Michael Tranghese.

No doubt, the ACC’s action will have a ripple effect in the industry and shape television negotiations for a new BCS contract in 2006.

Losing Miami and Virginia Tech is a football gut-punch to the Big East, although retaining Syracuse and Boston College keeps the basketball side viable and strong. To recoup the football losses, the Big East is likely to invade Conference USA for Louisville and then make a pitch for Central Florida, a football independent seeking a place to call home.

A newly formed Big East almost certainly will feature separate divisions for schools that play major college football and those that don’t.

The football division might feature Syracuse, Boston College, Rutgers, West Virginia, Pittsburgh, Connecticut, Louisville and Central Florida, with the non-Division I-A football side having the likes of Villanova, Seton Hall, St. John’s, Georgetown, Providence and two additional schools recruited from other conferences (Look out below, Atlantic 10).

See, this looting business cuts both ways.

There’s no telling how far west this ACC wave will crash.

The Pacific 10 Conference is staunchly opposed to expansion, largely because it doesn’t see viable candidates in terms of geography and also questions the economic sense of expansion.

And what if the ACC gets the NCAA to lower the championship-game requirement from 12 to 10 schools?

Even in that scenario, the Pac-10 has made clear it would not be interested in splitting into five-school divisions for the purpose of hosting a Pac-10 championship game.

Of course, today is only Thursday.

In the rough-neck, cut-throat, eat-your-own world of college athletics, change is only a teleconference away.

And all you need in a nine-school conference is a 7-2 vote.