ACC Explains BC/Cuse Scheduling

When the ACC schedule was announced this week, many Boston College fans were surprised to see the BC and Syracuse game moved off of Thanksgiving weekend. Boston College will now play Wake Forest while Syracuse will take on former Big East rival Pitt on that weekend.

While not Ohio State and Michigan or Auburn and Alabama, BC has played ‘Cuse more than any other team aside from Holy Cross. The two schools met on the last three Thanksgiving weekends and looked to be establishing at least a decent northeast rivalry on Turkey Day weekend.

I reached out to the ACC for comment on the scheduling change. ACC scheduling guru Michael Strickland had this to say about overall changes to Thanksgiving weekend games:

"Establishing a consistent set of match-ups to end our season became a focus for us a few seasons ago; this coming year, however, we had to make some changes to those match-ups due to non-conference scheduling dynamics. Both Wake Forest and Duke were open in week 2, so it was either have them play against one another or have both take their only bye of the season and close the season with games in 11 consecutive weeks. With the latter being untenable, we made some minor adjustments to the final week's match-ups, which we expect will be a one-time modification."

ACC Associate Commissioner Mike Finn was also asked to comment and he said:

"This year’s schedule is one of 12 games for only 13 weeks, so there is only one open date per team (instead of two), which makes the schedule very inflexible and situations like this can occur from time to time."

The explanation by the ACC is not as sexy as some of the theories that have been thrown around about why the game was taken off of Thanksgiving weekend. However, it’s pretty tough to prove the ACC’s explanation wrong.

Eric Hoffses is a contributor for BCI. Follow him on Twitter at @EAHoffses

Eric can also be reached at EricHoffses@Gmail.com