They went ahead and destroyed the ACC in order to save it. Rather than wait, from a position of relative strength, to see if the college-athletics bubble burst and made the ACC’s long-term television deal more attractive to Clemson and Florida State, the other members of the league panicked and assured their eventual exit, and North Carolina’s as well.
...
Ensuring the inevitable departure of its three most valuable schools, adding three athletically irrelevant ones while oozing across two more time zones like spilled milk, and getting a relatively insignificant financial boost for doing it, the panicking presidents turned the ACC into an overgrown AAC.
...
N.C. State chancellor Randy Woodson – continuing to singlehandedly disprove Bill Friday’s belief that university presidents are the best stewards of athletics – held the dagger that stabbed what used to be the ACC in the back
Whatever hopes N.C. State may have had of UNC taking them along if and when the End Times come went right out the window then; Woodson all but condemned his own school to future second-tier status...
...
Pushing through this expansion over their objections will certainly ensure their departures, and perhaps even hasten them...You’d like to think someone at the ACC checked to make sure adding these teams doesn’t somehow weaken the grant of rights, but the lawyering will only intensify.
[Good point, that last.]
...
It was a late-night deal at Food Lion: Buy one irrelevant football program, get two free. ...
[Football, football, football. It's all football. I predict the D-3 (I thought it was two. Whatevs.) will not leave; I predict that they will not want to leave in 2036 when the g.o.r. ends. I predict that this expansion will be the most consequential in the history of realignment and that the ACC will be king of the hill.]
Notre Dame pushed as hard for this as anyone, the 20 percent partner with 100 percent of a vote, and you can bet it’s just the first step in a plan to get out of its commitment to join the ACC in football if it ever abandons independence. Weakening and splintering the ACC will make it possible to join the Big Ten, where Notre Dame clearly would prefer to be.
[Not true. That is not true.]
Of course, the real question is why these other ACC schools even listen to Notre Dame at this point. You can’t blame Notre Dame for acting in its nature any more than you can blame a raccoon for going through your garbage. It’s your fault you didn’t secure the cans.
[Brutal and insulting.]
It no longer matters. The damage is done. The ACC, suddenly obsessed with preparing for an exodus of its most valued members that by its own actions went from hypothetical to inevitable, has added three schools that bring nothing to the table in football or men’s basketball and are irrelevant in their own markets. Instead of booting Boston College from the league — that would have been the smart move! — the ACC tripled down. So afraid of being left behind, 12 members of the ACC did the one thing that would assure they will be.
[Kick B.C. out. Unbelievable. UNC, Half Ass U, It's Probation Time Again Y'all--LEAVE!]
