Which ACC Teams Voted For / Against The Eight-Game Conference Schedule?

ESPN's Heather Dinich had an interesting tidbit in yesterday's article entitled 8-game schedule right move for ACC. According to a source, the vote was far from unanimous.

This move wasn't catering only to Florida State and Clemson, though. It was approved by a close 8-6 vote of league athletic directors, including Pittsburgh and Syracuse, according to a source who voted at the fall meeting in Boston.

Boston College's interim A.D. John Kane was on-hand representing the program at the ACC's fall meetings in Needham. Was he the vote that swung the vote in favor of a move back to the eight-game schedule?

Of course, it's fun to play the guessing game as to who was in favor of this move and who was against it.

You can immediately count Clemson, Florida State and Georgia Tech among the programs in favor of the move back to eight conference games. All three programs, with built-in SEC rivals, were feeling the non-conference scheduling crunch that comes with having just three non-conference games a year.

From there, it gets a little more murky. Purely guessing here, but I would imagine both the new guys -- Syracuse and Pittsburgh -- were in favor of the move back down to eight league games. I'm going to venture a guess that Boston College and Miami joined their former Big East rivals in voting for more non-conference scheduling flexibility.

That leaves one more program in favor. Virginia Tech? Maryland? Not sure.

As for the teams that voted against this, I'd imagine Wake Forest is one given the fact that a nine-game conference schedule would have brought two of their Carolina neighbors to campus more often. Difficulties in non-conference scheduling with the smallest stadium in the conference was likely another factor. Virginia goes along with whatever North Carolina and Duke does, and I'm sure the original ACC members preferred more, not less, conference games. N.C. State would have made it a Carolina block vote, leaving whichever program of Virginia Tech or Maryland that didn't vote in favor of eight games as the sixth and final vote against.

Again, this is mere conjecture. But if the vote went down in this way, it's interesting to see where the interests of each program fall on either side of this debate. To me, this vote likely split down expansion vs. original ACC member lines, with Clemson joining with FSU and Georgia Tech on the expansion side of the argument. Something to keep an eye on going forward, as the original ACC members voting power has now been diluted to the point where it's an even seven-seven split (with Notre Dame the tiebreaker vote for non-football matters).