Over three days of talks, two trains of thought emerged: Keep the current two-division format that has been in place for football since 2005 or go to a geographically oriented north-south format to reflect the conference’s expansion along the Eastern Seaboard.
“Our goal was to move the ball into the red zone, so we would at least know what the issues were, what the different possibilities were in terms of scheduling all the different sports,” Littlepage said. “We didn’t go any further than that.”
The reason the talks haven’t moved past the preliminary stage is that the ACC’s sudden expansion has caused its pre-existing members to jockey for position in an attempt to preserve long-standing rivalries.
ACC Commissioner John Swofford told reporters last week about a potential north-south divisional set-up with a north division that would include Boston College, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Maryland, Virginia, Virginia Tech and one North Carolina school.
That, though, drew concerns from at least three athletic directors earlier this month when the league met in Charlottesville.
“I think it puts too much of yesteryear together in half of the division,” Virginia Tech Athletic Director Jim Weaver said, referencing the 12 seasons (1992-2003) the Hokies spent as a member of the Big East. “We would prefer to keep the Atlantic and Coastal divisions as they now are. There’s seven years of brand identification with that.”
Littlepage said Virginia is also in favor of the ACC maintaining its current divisional format — with the conference simply putting Syracuse in one division and Pittsburgh in the other — because of the competitive balance that has been struck between the Atlantic and Coastal divisions. Entering the 2011 season, the Atlantic Division was 59-55 against Coastal Division foes in football.
More important, though, Littlepage is wary of the Cavaliers losing one of their principal rivalries. In the proposed northern division, Virginia would face rivals Virginia Tech and Maryland every year in football, but Littlepage would also like to preserve Virginia’s annual matchup with North Carolina, considered the longest-running rivalry in the South (the teams have met 116 times).
As it stands now, Maryland, Boston College, North Carolina State, Florida State, Wake Forest and Clemson compete in the Atlantic Division, and Virginia, Virginia Tech, Miami, Georgia Tech, Duke and North Carolina comprise the Coastal Division. Each ACC football team plays every member of its division annually and has a crossover rival in the other division that it also faces every year. In addition, each team also plays two cross-division games that are determined on a rotational basis.
Loading...
Comments