HISTORY 101
August 22, 2011 11:47 AM | General
Since it’s the first day of classes at WVU I thought it appropriate to have a little history lesson, so let’s step into our time machine and go back to 1953, the year West Virginia University almost got into the Atlantic Coast Conference.
First, a little background information is in order.
West Virginia joined the Southern Conference in 1950 to give the league an unwieldy 17 members spanning five states from South Carolina to West Virginia and including Washington, D.C. West Virginia athletic director Roy “Legs” Hawley turned his compass south when he couldn’t make any progress on an all-sports conference with some of the Eastern schools the Mountaineers were frequently facing in the late 1940s.
From the very beginning of WVU’s membership in the Southern Conference there were competing interests, the smaller and the bigger schools frequently at odds.
Then in the summer of 1951, the Southern Conference joined the Big Seven Conference and its top football program, Oklahoma, in banning members from participating in post-season bowl games as part of an on-going movement by a number of NCAA institutions wishing to de-emphasize college football.
Tulane and Vanderbilt spearheaded a de-emphasis program in the Southeastern Conference that didn’t get very far (it did not include the banning of bowl games), and new Big Ten member Michigan State was also in favor of banning bowl game appearances.
The decision by the Southern Conference to ban bowls was bitterly opposed by Maryland, then one of the top football programs in the country with Big Jim Tatum running the show in College Park, and Clemson, which frequently fielded bowl-caliber teams. Both Maryland and Clemson opted to play in bowl games that year anyway, the Terps defeating Tennessee in the Sugar Bowl to finish with a perfect 10-0 record, and Clemson losing to Miami in the Gator Bowl. As a result of those decisions, Clemson and Maryland were deemed ineligible to compete for the Southern Conference football title in 1952, thus setting in motion the eventual withdraw from the Southern Conference of those two schools, along with the Carolina schools, to form the Atlantic Coast Conference in the summer of 1953.
Seven months later, in early December, two months after the University of Virginia was invited to become the ACC’s eighth member, West Virginia and Virginia Tech were also under consideration for additional league expansion. From the time of the Southern Conference split, West Virginia and Virginia Tech had supporters who wanted them brought into the league along with Virginia as a package deal.
And West Virginia’s candidacy became even more appealing when the Mountaineers won eight regular season games and were invited to play Georgia Tech in the Sugar Bowl, adding to the school’s already sterling reputation for having a first-rate college basketball program (In 1953, the Southern Conference opted to remove its bowl ban, enabling West Virginia to accept the Sugar Bowl bid, although the Mountaineers had to forfeit 75 percent of their bowl proceeds to the league in order to go).
Virginia Tech was appealing as well because it was a charter member of the Southern Conference, was located near most of the schools in the ACC, boasted a solid academic reputation and its athletic program possessed a great deal of potential.
The ACC met on Friday, Dec. 4, 1953 in Greensboro, N.C., and during the meeting University of North Carolina Chancellor Robert House officially moved to admit West Virginia and Virginia Tech as the league’s ninth and 10th members. But ACC President James T. Penney of South Carolina ruled the motion out of order since the matter wasn’t officially on the agenda. Following a short closed session, the eight schools decided to table expansion for an indefinite period of time because West Virginia and Virginia Tech could not garner the necessary two-thirds votes to gain admittance. There was a four-four split in the voting, although the schools for and against were never publicly revealed. The reason for tabling the motion was obvious – support for membership wasn’t clear cut, both parties wanted to avoid the embarrassment of a public discussion when the Mountaineers were getting ready to play in the Sugar Bowl, and some ACC members believed further expansion would detract from the original goal of having the close, compact association it had developed at its outset.
In the same light, ACC vice-president F.W. Clounts of Wake Forest made it clear that the Deacons supported Virginia Tech’s membership but not West Virginia’s because of the great distance between Morgantown and the rest of the ACC (at that time there was no Interstate highway system and air service was just getting off the ground).
West Virginia and Maryland also didn’t see eye to eye on issues related to its football programs. Tatum wasn’t pleased with West Virginia’s support of the league’s bowl ban rule in 1951, and he also accused the Mountaineers of using some ineligible players during a game between the two schools early in his Maryland coaching tenure.
West Virginia’s failure to gain admittance into the Atlantic Coast Conference was one of athletic director “Legs” Hawley’s biggest disappointments. Just three months after seeing his alma mater denied admission into the ACC, Hawley died of a heart attack in March, 1954, at age of 53.
You could say Hawley died of a broken heart.
Even today, as West Virginia University continues to thrive as a proud member of the Big East Conference, there are still many old-time Mountaineer supporters who have always held the Atlantic Coast Conference in such high regard.
They remember how close West Virginia came to joining the ACC.
First, a little background information is in order.
West Virginia joined the Southern Conference in 1950 to give the league an unwieldy 17 members spanning five states from South Carolina to West Virginia and including Washington, D.C. West Virginia athletic director Roy “Legs” Hawley turned his compass south when he couldn’t make any progress on an all-sports conference with some of the Eastern schools the Mountaineers were frequently facing in the late 1940s.
From the very beginning of WVU’s membership in the Southern Conference there were competing interests, the smaller and the bigger schools frequently at odds.
Then in the summer of 1951, the Southern Conference joined the Big Seven Conference and its top football program, Oklahoma, in banning members from participating in post-season bowl games as part of an on-going movement by a number of NCAA institutions wishing to de-emphasize college football.
Tulane and Vanderbilt spearheaded a de-emphasis program in the Southeastern Conference that didn’t get very far (it did not include the banning of bowl games), and new Big Ten member Michigan State was also in favor of banning bowl game appearances.
The decision by the Southern Conference to ban bowls was bitterly opposed by Maryland, then one of the top football programs in the country with Big Jim Tatum running the show in College Park, and Clemson, which frequently fielded bowl-caliber teams. Both Maryland and Clemson opted to play in bowl games that year anyway, the Terps defeating Tennessee in the Sugar Bowl to finish with a perfect 10-0 record, and Clemson losing to Miami in the Gator Bowl. As a result of those decisions, Clemson and Maryland were deemed ineligible to compete for the Southern Conference football title in 1952, thus setting in motion the eventual withdraw from the Southern Conference of those two schools, along with the Carolina schools, to form the Atlantic Coast Conference in the summer of 1953.
Seven months later, in early December, two months after the University of Virginia was invited to become the ACC’s eighth member, West Virginia and Virginia Tech were also under consideration for additional league expansion. From the time of the Southern Conference split, West Virginia and Virginia Tech had supporters who wanted them brought into the league along with Virginia as a package deal.
And West Virginia’s candidacy became even more appealing when the Mountaineers won eight regular season games and were invited to play Georgia Tech in the Sugar Bowl, adding to the school’s already sterling reputation for having a first-rate college basketball program (In 1953, the Southern Conference opted to remove its bowl ban, enabling West Virginia to accept the Sugar Bowl bid, although the Mountaineers had to forfeit 75 percent of their bowl proceeds to the league in order to go).
Virginia Tech was appealing as well because it was a charter member of the Southern Conference, was located near most of the schools in the ACC, boasted a solid academic reputation and its athletic program possessed a great deal of potential.
The ACC met on Friday, Dec. 4, 1953 in Greensboro, N.C., and during the meeting University of North Carolina Chancellor Robert House officially moved to admit West Virginia and Virginia Tech as the league’s ninth and 10th members. But ACC President James T. Penney of South Carolina ruled the motion out of order since the matter wasn’t officially on the agenda. Following a short closed session, the eight schools decided to table expansion for an indefinite period of time because West Virginia and Virginia Tech could not garner the necessary two-thirds votes to gain admittance. There was a four-four split in the voting, although the schools for and against were never publicly revealed. The reason for tabling the motion was obvious – support for membership wasn’t clear cut, both parties wanted to avoid the embarrassment of a public discussion when the Mountaineers were getting ready to play in the Sugar Bowl, and some ACC members believed further expansion would detract from the original goal of having the close, compact association it had developed at its outset.
In the same light, ACC vice-president F.W. Clounts of Wake Forest made it clear that the Deacons supported Virginia Tech’s membership but not West Virginia’s because of the great distance between Morgantown and the rest of the ACC (at that time there was no Interstate highway system and air service was just getting off the ground).
West Virginia and Maryland also didn’t see eye to eye on issues related to its football programs. Tatum wasn’t pleased with West Virginia’s support of the league’s bowl ban rule in 1951, and he also accused the Mountaineers of using some ineligible players during a game between the two schools early in his Maryland coaching tenure.
West Virginia’s failure to gain admittance into the Atlantic Coast Conference was one of athletic director “Legs” Hawley’s biggest disappointments. Just three months after seeing his alma mater denied admission into the ACC, Hawley died of a heart attack in March, 1954, at age of 53.
You could say Hawley died of a broken heart.
Even today, as West Virginia University continues to thrive as a proud member of the Big East Conference, there are still many old-time Mountaineer supporters who have always held the Atlantic Coast Conference in such high regard.
They remember how close West Virginia came to joining the ACC.
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