ACC Shit: Part 1, Not What hey Had In Mind

What ever the idea was when the ACC added three teams from the Big East to the conference in 2004 and 2005, I am sure that what has taken place is about as far from that as you can get. If the ACC wanted to become a legitimate top tier conference, one that could be mentioned with the SEC, they have failed in the short run, and in dramatic fashion. In the long run? It will probably work out.

Florida State was the dominat team in this conference, and they have been such since they were brought into the ACC fold for the 1992 season. FSU won a share of all but 3 conference titles in the 14 years they have been in the conference. Thats a good percentage if you didn’t figure that out. I don’t think that anyone at ACC headquarters expected a total repreive of FSU’s run with the addition of Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College. But they had to have expected a little more in terms of dividends for their investment.

I don’t think that they had Wake Forrest winning the ACC in mind either. Now there are two ways to look that event. On the one hand you can point to Wake winning the conference and claim that the league has more parity now then it did before, and you would be right to a point. But the fact that wake won the conference does not mean that Wake played at a drasticlly higher level. Don’t get it twiested, they definatly did play at higher level last season. But even at that level of play they would not have won the conference if everyone else had not been so maddeningly inconsistent last season. That was a team that in years past would have been bowl bound, not a conference champion. But the inability of Boston College, Clemson and Maryland to see that winning the division title would be in their best interests allowed Wake to emerge as division champion. Maybe they did realize that but either way, they failed to jump on the opportunity at hand.

In the same vein I think that most evey team in the conference has improved, yes even Duke. That improvement is, really all the conference has to hang its hat on right now. I think that the original plan for the conference when the solicitation of Miami and Virginia Tech began was that there would be three legitimate national power programs. And that fact, more than anything else was intended to be the genisis of improvment for everyone else, trying to compete with Miami, VATech and FSU would make them better and give them more depth relative to other conferences.

What is in place now, however can’t be what the ones in power expected. The conference has improved by leaps and bounds, without any other programs (read VaTech, FSU and Miami) dragging them along. 4 different teams have played in the ACC championship game, the depth of the conference is better. But there is no program that you can say is national program, except for one, maye. That is Virginia Tech, that is good, but the gap between the Hookies and their divisional rivals is not that large at all, and that is the problem, parity is good for a conference to a point. A good conference should have a difinitive heirarchy. At the top should be the elite of the elite, well respected national programs. Below that should be schools that can threaten for the top 25, below them should be the conference’s punching bags. Right now the ACC has Virginia Tech in the first catagory, about 10 schools in the second and Duke in the third. The depth is good, but that doesn’t help the perception of the program nationaly. In time the conference will develop into a beast, but it is not right now.