Where there's smoke, there's fire ...
"The Atlantic Coast Conference has been approached by at least 10 schools about possible membership, a group that includes the Big East's Pitt and Syracuse, both of which have tendered letters of application, a high-ranking ACC official said Saturday morning."
This is the true story of two conference commissioners ... picked to share the Eastern seaboard of the US ... to find out what happens... when people stop being polite... and start getting real...
The Pittsburgh Panthers blog Cardiac Hill is on board.
"I wholeheartedly think that this is the right move should an offer from the ACC come to Pittsburgh. Pitt is in top-25 media market, one of the top public universities in the nation, has a football program on the rise, and a top-notch basketball team while remaining solid in non-revenue sports. The ACC will give Pitt a chance to rekindle old rivalries with Miami, Virginia Tech, and Boston College, as well as form new ones with nearby schools like Maryland and Virginia."
Big East Coast Bias thinks that if the report is true, the Big East is dead.
"If the move occurs, the Big East is dead. There's no other way to spin it. Pittsburgh and Syracuse have been bedrock members of the conference and it would likely mean the crumbling of the Big East and the soaking up of more valuable members by other conference hoping to also expand. It's virtually impossible to lay out all of the possible paths expansion could take. Regardless, we could be looking at the death of the Big East in a matter of weeks."
Maybe not dead, but looking more and more like Conference USA part 2.
I sincerely hope that schools like North Carolina and Duke are on board with the additions of Syracuse and Pittsburgh. This is a slam dunk for the conference, and Syracuse and Pitt should be added with or without Texas and a possible 16th school.
With the ACC presidents unanimously approving an increase in the buyout for schools to leave the conference by nearly a factor of two, sounds highly unlikely that a current member would defect for another conference such as the ACC. The fact that the presidents also approved this measure makes it seem that the conference is confident it can renegotiate its media rights contract with the addition of new schools.