The ACC's been mighty quiet on the conference realignment rumor front of late, which is just when John Swofford's at his most deadly. Recall how he swiped the Pittsburgh Panthers and Syracuse Orange from the Big East before John Marinatto even knew about it. So what's the ACC up to?
ACC Expansion Mayhem Rumors Return: Let’s Call It ‘March Madness’
Still hoping to land the Notre Dame Fighting Irish and Rutgers Scarlet Knights, Kelly Quinlan of Rivals' Georgia Tech site reports. That makes sense, as that's been the presumed standing for quite a while now. Quinlan cites multiple ESPN insiders. And not, like, the website subscriber kind.
But then, the report continues to list Notre Dame, Rutgers, Maryland and Georgia Tech as schools the Big Ten could pick up, also at the urging of Big Television. SB Nation’s de facto ACC blog, BC Interruption, ain’t buying that one bit:
The ACC is not as easy a poaching target as the Big 12 or the Big East, younger conferences that by their own design are destabilized. The Big 12 destabilized based on unequal revenue sharing; the Big East never quite solved the football-hoops split ...
The other reason I don’t buy the second part of this rumor is based on the players involved. Why would ESPN, which has a long-term contract with the ACC, want to weaken the conference in favor of the Big Ten (who has its own television network and a partnership with Fox) and the SEC (CBS). If there is even a half truth in [Boston College athletic director Gene] DeFilippo’s flippant comments about ESPN’s role in conference realignment, why would the WWL want to tear down what they just helped create?
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