ACC Realignment Rumors

A modest proposal

College Game Balls pointed out yesterday that rumors abound about possible realignment of the ACC's football divisions. What he found was talk of Boston College and Maryland moving from the Atlantic to the Coastal with Miami and Georgia Tech moving from the Coastal to the Atlantic. This would create more of a true North-South division alignment.

I'm all for it as long as it means the Hokies don't have to play at Miami and at BC in the same season every two years. The new divisions CGB found would help a lot with travel and look like this:

Atlantic
Clemson
Florida State
Georgia Tech
Miami
NC State
Wake Forest

Coastal
Boston College
Duke
Maryland
North Carolina
Virginia
Virginia Tech

And my best guess for Interdivision Rivals:

BC -----> CU
DU -----> WF
MD -----> GT
NC -----> NCST
VA -----> FSU
VT -----> UM

If the Hokies continued to play Miami every year, the only real change to the schedule would be playing Maryland every year and playing Georgia Tech two out of every five years. The problem that arises is how to keep Tech from going to Boston and Miami every other year. The answer is simple. The Hokies will just need to do what Georgia Tech did when it played at Virginia Tech in consecutive years. I'm willing to have the Hokies travel to Boston back-to-back seasons in order for that to happen.

As Brian and Jeff at BC Interruption mention, none of this would happen until after the 2015 football season. But until then, it's fun to speculate.

BCI takes it one step too far

Brian's proposed division realignment looks similar to the one above, but he swaps UNC for Wake as well, which in my opinion would never fly because it makes too much sense. Brian backs up his proposal with all these "facts" and "numbers". But on paper, just looking at the names, the ACC South looks MUCH more difficult than the ACC North. Therefore, it would never pass inspection if it were ever voted on.

Brian's ACC Divisions:

ACC North
Virginia Tech (.781)
Boston College (.656)
Wake Forest (.563)
Virginia (.500)
Maryland (.469)
Duke (.031)

ACC South
Georgia Tech (.656)
Clemson (.563)
Florida State (.531)
Miami (FL) (.469)
North Carolina (.406)
NC State (.375)

Those numbers to the right of each school are winning percentages since BC joined in 2005. But if you factor in tradition and the average North Carolinian's perception of ACC football, Brian's divisions suddenly look like this:

ACC North
VIRGINIA TECH
yankee invaders
wake forest
virginia
maryland
worst team evar

ACC South
GEORGIA TECH
CLEMPSON
F$U
DA U!!!
NORTH CAROLINA
NC STATE

That doesn't seem like a balanced ACC now, does it? It'll never happen. So, while Brian's divisions would be nice, let's just hope for the first ACC South-North alignment that was discovered by CGB. At least then the conference doesn't have to worry about trying to explain why teams are in their current confusing divisions.

Why wait?

What I would prefer is for the conference to expedite the realignment. Just because it announced the football schedule through 2015 doesn't mean it has to let it run its course. Hell, the schedule's enough to figure out it could announce the schedule through 2050 it wanted to. The schedule repeats itself every five years. It's not the square root of pi.

The ACC should just do what everyone else in the country is doing. Blame the economy. But placing the blame on "travel budgets need to be scaled back" the conference can implement new North-South divisions without any batting an eye. Hell, it would be applauded. Get it done.

Putting it off seven seasons would hurt realignment. By then, Obama could have the economy fixed and ACC fans would forget why we were going to realign in the first place and put the kibosh on the whole thing. The ACC needs to act now in case a perfectly good excuse to fix the mess it put us in in the first place goes away (hopefully).