Five Years After the ACC's Expansion, Is Bigger Really Better?

And for good reason. Virginia Tech -- which with Miami began competing in the ACC in 2004, a year before Boston College -- has earned the ACC's BCS bowl bid two out of the past four seasons. The Hokies have appeared in two of the three ACC conference title games.

In fact, Virginia Tech has been a stanchion for a conference whose football powerhouses have struggled in recent seasons. Florida State won the inaugural conference title game and earned a BCS bowl in 2005-06, but has gone 14-12 in the two seasons since. After going 9-3 and winning six conference games in its first ACC season, Miami -- the prized jewel of the ACC expansion because of its football team's tradition of success -- has won just five conference games and finished with a 12-13 record the past two years. The Hurricanes have yet to play in an ACC title game.

When it came time to divide the conference into two, six-team divisions, Florida State and Miami were split up, the hope being that each program would anchor its respective side. "Florida State and Miami were put in separate divisions because people thought we would wind up playing in the championship game against each other," said Florida State President T.K. Wetherell. "But that hasn't happened yet."

Further hampering the ACC's bid for increased football prominence, Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina State -- all of which appeared on the rise at the time of the expansion -- have wavered since the realignment.

Mike Farrell, a college football recruiting analyst for Rivals.com, pointed to recruiting as one area in which the ACC has not taken full advantage of the reconfigured boundaries expansion made possible.

The ACC "wanted to take away the label of just being a basketball conference," Farrell said. "They wanted to make themselves a football conference like the SEC and the Big 12. Those conferences really raised the level of their recruiting on a national level. I don't think that's happened to the ACC yet. But that doesn't mean they haven't gotten good recruits."

In trying to make itself into more of a football conference, the ACC may also have unintentionally weakened its reputation in men's basketball.

Pete Gillen, men's basketball coach at Virginia from 1998 to 2005, said many of the league's veteran coaches were apprehensive about the realignment. According to Gillen, the league placed less emphasis on promoting ACC basketball -- for decades the heart and soul of men's ACC athletics -- while it focused on football.

Several league coaches perceived, Gillen said, that the ACC assumed the conference's traditional basketball strength would maintain itself. North Carolina won the national championship in 2005, but overall the league's basketball performance has fallen short of expectations.

In the past three years, the ACC has sent a combined 15 teams to the NCAA tournament -- the same number as in the three years immediately before expansion. The Big East, by contrast, has sent 22 teams to the tournament the past three years, including two seasons in which it sent a record eight teams; it had sent 16 schools in the three previous years.

"Football drove the expansion, and I understand that; they make all the money," said Gillen, who is a college basketball commentator for the CBS College Sports Network. "They're not hurting basketball, but they seem to think it's a self-perpetuating entity, and it's not."

Swofford dismissed suggestions that ACC basketball has declined since expansion, noting that the ACC remains one of the most competitive basketball conferences in the country. "What really builds a conference is competitiveness from within as well as a few key outside wins," he said. However, Swofford conceded that the ACC has not had as many wins against nonconference schools as he would have liked in recent years.