BC: Now or Never
October 24, 2003 11:03 AM | General
October 24, 2003
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – This is just one man's personal opinion, but in the long history of collegiate athletics it is difficult to come up with a breakup as acrimonious as the one the Big East Conference is going through right now with Boston College.
Sure there was bitterness when the Southwest Conference split apart at its seams: Texas, Texas Tech, Baylor and Texas A&M going in one direction to turn the Big 8 into the Big 12; Arkansas going in another direction to join the SEC; Rice, SMU, TCU and Houston left holding the bag.
Yet by the early 1990s the Southwest Conference, a league made up mostly of Texas schools, was dead in the water anyway. Its demise could be spelled out in the two simple letters T-V -- no athletic conference with members based primarily in one state could ever muster enough eyeballs to lure the all-too-powerful television execs.
Other conference grabs have come out of necessity: the Pac-8 going to 10 teams in 1978 when it added Arizona and Arizona State and the SEC expanding to 12 teams when it added Arkansas and football independent South Carolina. The SEC’s move came after longtime Eastern independent Penn State decided to join the Big Ten in 1990.
In the Northeast there wasn’t considerable ill will toward Penn State because it was apparent to all that the Lions were only extricating themselves from the mess that had become of Eastern athletics.
It was in this environment that the Big East Football Conference was created. The form and the eventual direction of the league have been well documented. Miami and, to a greater extent Virginia Tech, have benefited greatly from their association with the Big East. To varying degrees Syracuse, West Virginia, Boston College and Pitt have had their moments, too.
“Leagues can help make programs, not the other way around,” Syracuse basketball coach Jim Boeheim told ESPN.com’s Ivan Maisel. “At one time, Virginia Tech wasn’t Virginia Tech. At one time in basketball, Connecticut wasn’t Connecticut.”
By the end of last spring it was clear that Miami was going to leave the Big East to join the ACC -- the Hurricanes even turning down an offer of $9 million by the other Big East schools.
And while Miami needed the loot, losing more than $2 million last year despite playing in the national championship game, the Hurricanes felt they could get much more in the ACC.
What wasn’t clear was what other school – if any – would join Miami in the ACC. As it usually does when politics enters the fray, the process turned into a complicated mess. In June ACC presidents wound up voting in Miami and Virginia Tech -- the Hokies not even in original expansion plans until Gov. Mark Warner and the Virginia legislature put the squeeze on UVa to either vote for Tech or vote for no one when it came time for expansion.
Syracuse, uncomfortable with the thought of leaving a conference it helped create, was simply exploring all of its options. The Orange were going to play this thing right down the middle as long as they could.
Virginia Tech, never really at ease in the Big East and always wanting to be a member of the ACC, had realized a longstanding institutional goal even though it had entered into a blood pact with the remaining Big East schools and was part of a lawsuit against the ACC, Miami and Boston College.
Once they were voted in, the Hokies quietly removed their name from the lawsuit and gladly wrote the check for their share of the legal fees knowing it was a small price to pay to get into a league they had always looked up to with envy.
Then there’s Boston College – one of the original members of the Big East Conference. While it was damaging losing two football programs with the pedigree of Miami and Virginia Tech, the impact of BC’s loss is more psychological.
In the Tom O’Brien post-gambling-scandal era, BC’s best conference finish was third in 1999. Only twice since 1996 has Boston College finished the season with a winning record in league play.
The Eagles aren’t a major player in college football. That’s why the BC brass was so anxious to leave the conference because they knew if they didn’t, upstart Connecticut would soon become a more viable option down the road boasting a much stronger all-sports program.
For Boston College it was now or never.
It didn’t matter to BC decision makers that their school was going to be paired in an ACC division with its closest travel partner being Maryland – a mere three-hour drive from Morgantown – or the fact that its diverse athletic program features such sports as skiing, sailing and hockey, hardly ACC staples.
It didn’t matter to them that the BC swimming team could have a five-day layover in Raleigh-Durham when a snowstorm shuts down Logan Airport (does Logan even have direct flights to Raleigh-Durham?), or that it won’t be a simple trip for the baseball team to get from Boston to Clemson, S.C. -- if BC can afford to keep its baseball team.
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| In the 1980s Boston College typically depicted a shoeless hillbilly on the cover of its game program when playing host to West Virginia. |
Better yet, wonder how Clemson Tiger or Virginia Cavalier football fans are going to react when they make their first trip to Boston, take in a great night on the town, meet some fabulous people, and then the next day arrive at the stadium to see Boston College present them with a game program depicting a shoeless hillbilly with a bottle of moonshine on its cover? And to this day BC people can’t figure out why West Virginia wins two out of every three times the two teams play.
It didn’t matter to them that they turned BC’s geography completely upside down. Student-athletes from New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York and New Jersey will surely be enthusiastic about the prospects of their families flying to see them play road games.
Wonder what impact that will have on future student-athletes in the Northeast wanting to attend BC? Maybe Boston College should call Penn State collect to find out about that one.
BC stated it wanted to open its doors to the South and have more of a Southern presence. Good luck.
For Boston College it was now or never.
That’s why BC was so reluctant to sign a document to remain in the Big East back in the spring when Miami was being courted by the ACC, even though others were willing to do so.
When ACC presidents failed to vote in Boston College despite making a very public tour of the campus just weeks earlier, it was a crushing blow to the Boston College administration and a personal embarrassment to Athletic Director Gene DeFilippo and President Rev. Father William P. Leahy.
ACC commissioner John Swofford, either leading the expansion movement or being guided by others in the dark, was also embarrassed that he couldn’t get all of the schools on board despite several attempts. Remember Swofford was once AD at North Carolina – one of the key schools adamantly against expansion.
Knowing that 11 schools wasn’t going to fit and realizing that it was going to take some work to get an agreement on having a football championship game without 12 teams, their simplest solution was to go back to the phones and add another school.
The ACC could have gone through the process of petitioning the NCAA to play a championship game with 11 teams and would have probably gotten the okay to do so. But when the ACC didn’t do that, it became apparent that their motives were petty and destructive.
So the ACC tried to get Notre Dame, once again brushing aside the faithful and compliant Eagles. It was only when the ACC realized that Notre Dame had no interest whatsoever in parting with its football independence and doesn’t cast away tradition like a used napkin did it come back around to Boston College.
This latest vote was said to be unanimous and BC was officially in. The Eagles had until November to make up their minds, but it took them all of four hours to walk away from a nearly 25-year relationship it had developed with the Big East Conference.
Rutgers athletic director Robert Mulcahy called the Eagles “traitors.” He vows never to play them again in any sport.
Syracuse president Kenneth “Buzz” Shaw referred to DeFilippo and Leahy as “double agents.”
Both DeFilippo and Leahy had made positive public statements about the Big East and had active roles in the reconstruction of the conference even though they were still secretly having discussions with the ACC.
Editorials from several newspapers have been highly critical of BC’s decision to leave, too.
Wrote the hometown Boston Globe: “What is difficult to understand here is the sense that BC walked away from its heritage, its roots, walked away from friends in need at a time when survival, not comfort, is an issue.”
By the way, this is a newspaper that generally covers Boston College athletics on page 10, just ahead of the bowling and little league scores -- so much for the Eagles delivering the Boston market.
The Providence Journal was more direct: “Good luck to the Eagles. They have been supporting actors, never the stars, in Big East football. They will play the same role in the ACC.”
Ivan Maisel referred to Boston College as the “Baylor of the ACC,” meaning BC is not a good fit for the league and will never be competitive in football or basketball.
Elliott Teaford of the Los Angeles Times cryptically wrote that “the Mason-Dixon Line never looked so good.”
Even in Tobacco Road the reviews have been mixed despite a heavy PR barrage from the ACC. Wrote Lennox Rawlings of the Winston-Salem Journal: “The ACC now has a larger footprint, and you know what they say about bigger feet. Bigger feet have bigger calluses.”
Now that the ACC has expanded others are poised to move as well. The impact will be felt on both coasts with several other conferences being affected despite the ACC’s assertions that this wouldn’t occur.
So what happens to the Big East?
West Virginia University president David C. Hardesty Jr. is confident the league will survive. He has a seat on the BCS presidents’ committee. Others have also made positive statements understanding, too, that a lot of hard work is ahead of them.
Recent convincing football victories by Syracuse against Boston College and West Virginia versus Virginia Tech is a positive start to the process.
New schools will be brought in but the ultimate responsibility for repairing the Big East rests on the shoulders of West Virginia, Pitt, Syracuse and Rutgers – the four Eastern schools playing Division I-A football the longest. Connecticut will play its part later on when it adapts to playing an all-Division I-A schedule.
The new schools will be presented with a great opportunity to enhance themselves nationally.
Securing a TV contract for the new football league will be difficult but the Big East has always shown an ability to be creative. The same goes for future bowl affiliations.
Despite all the damage that has occurred unnecessarily to Big East football schools over the last six months, there is actually a silver lining that could come out of this: someone other than Miami and Virginia Tech is going to represent the Big East in a BCS bowl game next year. With a minimum of three fewer teams sharing the pie next season, significantly more revenue could be immediately available for Big East football schools to help build their programs.
With an 11-team ACC revenue split next year, the irony is Miami is now likely to get less in the ACC than it did last year in the Big East. Once projected to be a cash cow, a championship game is now only expected to get the ACC back to where it was LAST YEAR.
How will Miami be able to explain another year in the red this time?
The ACC’s profit margins could become even tighter whenever BC joins and that brings about this question: Where are all of those financial consultants now?
Not only have ACC presidents set in motion a chain of events that could one day become a detriment to its student-athletes, they may have done so at a considerable cost as well. That cost could eventually mean athletic budget cuts for the smaller schools -- not additional revenue for women’s sports as one Southern columnist foolishly suggested.
According to Ivan Maisel, during the BC-Syracuse game Gene DeFilippo sought out longtime Orangeman AD Jake Crouthamel. It was Crouthamel who was involved in the initial creation of the Big East in 1979. Maybe DeFilippo wanted to clear his conscience. It has been written that he prides himself on personal relationships. It wasn’t until the end of the game that DeFilippo finally caught up with Crouthamel.
“Nobody said this is an easy business,” DeFilippo told Maisel.
Last week West Virginia’s David C. Hardesty called Boston College’s decision to join the ACC “a considerable gamble.”
Yes, it was now or never for Boston College. Now that they’ve made their decision, will the Eagles be going to Never Never Land?
The views and opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of West Virginia University, the Department of Intercollegiate Athletics or the Mountaineer Sports Network.
