Originally Posted by
A-Tex Devil
That's the whole cosmic joke of expansion. The idea it's about anything besides money and as if these moves will make it more likely for teams to be more successful. It's not about championships at all. Florida St.'s AD and Pres seemed to be outwardly fairly happy about the ESPN contract. But you get a critical mass of fans with money complaining to the BOR, and you get what we had yesterday with FSU's board.
I have found recently that the board of regents at a lot of schools don't always have the entire university's best interest in mind, and sometimes are dangerous. Texas has been dealing with this very thing this past week due to our lovely governor trying to flex his muscles, almost causing a very popular university president to get fired. As mentioned before, these boards of regents are fans of the university. Certainly there are some "independent" folks on these boards of regents, but they don't have anywhere near the independence requirements of, say, a public corporation.
To Class of '94's point, FSU's fans and regents act as if the ACC has been holding it back in football, when it's been FSU's performance that's been holding it back. The ACC hasn't had a dominant team in a dozen years, and frankly MOST of the blame should land on the shoulders of FSU and Miami for that, although the whole conference, even Duke, shares in a lot of it. I'll grant that Va Tech has more or less held up its end of the bargain.
Anyway, I find the source of Florida St. fan's anger with the ACC as comical as A&M's was with the Big XII, and in many ways, it's worse. As for this discussion generally, I get that annoys and even in angers some. But I, for one, enjoy discussing the game theory and politics of all of this, especially with you guys, which is why I post here (although it's never been as interesting as June 2010). I am not entirely enthused as to WHY expansion is happening and certain of the endgame scenarios, but the speculation and chess games behind the scenes will always be intriguing.