ACC Expanding at Big East's Expense

Sep 19 2011

Syracuse University and the University of Pittsburgh have accepted invitations to join the Atlantic Coast Conference. The Panthers and Orange will become teams thirteen and fourteen, giving the ACC a footprint that covers nearly every major television market from Miami to Boston, but leaves the future of the Big East very much in doubt.

Fourteen Teams (and Counting)

With the addition of Pitt and Syracuse, membership in the ACC now stands at fourteen teams:

1. North Carolina
2. Duke
3. Florida State
4. Virginia Tech
5. Clemson
6. Boston College
7. Maryland
8. Virginia
9. Miami
10. North Carolina State
11. Georgia Tech
12. Wake Forest
13. Pittsburgh
14. Syracuse

They're also the fourth and fifth teams to jump from the Big East to the ACC; Boston College, Miami and Virginia Tech did so for the 2004-05 academic year.

More could follow. The ACC's ultimate goal could be a sixteen-team group, split into two divisions for conference play in hoops and football. Duke's Mike Krzyzewski and North Carolina's Roy Williams have already spoken out in favor of such an alignment.

According to rumor, Texas and Notre Dame top ACC commissioner John Swofford's wish list. Of course, the Longhorns and Fighting Irish also figure heavily in the expansion plans of the Big Ten and Pac 12. If the Longhorns look west, or manage to keep some semblance of the Big 12 intact, and if Notre Dame opts to stay independent in football, the 15th and 16th ACC teams could also come from the Big East, with Connecticut, Rutgers and Louisville obvious targets.

Adding the Huskies would give the ACC eight of the last eleven NCAA champions.

Big East bylaws require two years' notice from any team choosing to leave for another conference, but most expect some sort of settlement that would allow the Orange and the Panthers to begin ACC play with the 2012-13 season.

The Small East

The defections leave the Big East with just seven members in football - six, if TCU re-considers plans to join starting next year. That's a major problem for a conference desperately trying to hang on to membership in the BCS, and that's in the process of negotiating a new television contract. League commissioner Ed Marinatto may live to regret turning down a $1 billion contract extension with ESPN; at the time, he believed he'd be able to negotiate a better deal by getting ESPN, Fox and NBC's new Sports Network (formerly Versus) to bid against each other.

The last time the Big East lost teams to the ACC, the conference responded with its own expansion, adding five new members (Louisville, Cincinnati, South Florida, DePaul and Marquette) to replace the three that left. Marinatto will most likely attempt something similar to save his league, snapping up the leftovers from the imploding Big 12, such as Kansas, Kansas State, Iowa State Baylor and Missouri, or by raiding Conference USA to add a Memphis, Central Florida or East Carolina.

The Much-Anticipated Schism

This latest round of uncertainty could be the motivation the Big East's basketball-only members need to split off and form a new conference, made up of Catholic schools in major cities. A basketball conference consisting of Georgetown, St. John's, Villanova, Marquette, Seton Hall, Providence, DePaul and (assuming they stay independent in football) Notre Dame might be a pretty good option.

That hypothetical new conference could expand its geographic footprint by adding schools with similar profiles, such as Xavier, Duquesne, Saint Louis, St. Joseph's or Fordham from the Atlantic 10. The last two on that list could be least likely, as they share television markets with Villanova and St. John's, respectively. But Fordham has been making substantial new investments in its basketball program, partly in anticipation of a new Catholic-school conference that might split off from the Big East.

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