A New Future Conference for Duke?

[b&l]

Would be interesting to read thoughts and ideas on something still somewhat speculative, Duke's eventual exit from the ACC and entry into a new conference, perhaps a conference that doesn't today exist?

There was a time when any college or university that could field a football team had a chance at winning a national championship. And some pretty surprising teams were football powerhouses at one time or the other. Yes, even Duke. Since, however, the emergence of the NFL as big, big business, college football has evolved into more of a minor leagues for the pro's, but with the remaining big time bowl championship series. But even there, are there more than fifty schools in the whole country that can field, year after year, teams that might make it to the top bowls, or attract enough interest from the major tv networks to fund their big business football programs?

Duke is hardly the only smaller, private, academics focused university that has slipped out of the top ranks in football, or other major sports, for that matter. Many Ivy League schools once upon a time were big time football powers. As were Army and Navy, as well as some schools from the southeastern corner of America, schools like not only Duke but Rice, Vanderbilt, even a William & Mary.

In football, sooner or later every school had to decide whether they wanted to stay in the race to build bigger and better stadiums, build state of the art training and sports medicine facilities, and so on, not to mention pay millions to bring in the best coaching staffs. There was also a gradual de facto decision to be made, or not, to let academic standards slip for student athletes, the value of "athlete" far outstripping the "student" portion of the formula.

Where is Duke headed in this process? Is there an inevitability? Such as the realistic prospect of filling a big, expanded stadium?

So, if a school opts out of the attempts to compete with the major state schools, is there life after death? Could a conference be born out of this, one that could have as much or more excitement than the ACC?

Friends who attended Ivy League schools have often contended that their football games are lively, fun affairs with solid attendance. A Marshall University didn't go begging for fans, when it wasn't Division I. And where I grew up, eastern Ohio, there is a conference of small colleges that is as competitive as any in the country, only at a different division. Mt. Union is a perennial national powerhouse and champion. Never heard of it?

What about a conference with Duke, Rice, Vanderbilt, Army, Navy, William & Mary, Davidson, maybe even a Georgetown, Johns Hopkins or Xavier? Rather than calling it the Southern Ivy League could call it the Kudzu Conference. Hey, just kidding. The questions is, would such a conference diminish Duke's status in sports or make its competitiveness in each individual sport any less attractive?

It's an interesting subject, one relating to where Duke is five, ten or twenty years from now. It's not like conferences are chiseled in stone. Seems hardly a year goes by without there being some conference shakeups somewhere in the country. Why not take the lead in a new direction that might invigorate Duke sports and keep them competitive for decades to come? Just a thought, and further thoughts on the subject might even be interesting to Duke's adminstration, as there have been many rumors that such discussions do take place there, too.

[The Gordog]

Dude, Duke will drop out of the ACC over K's dead body. Literally. It will never happen while he lives. There is no point to discussing it.

[VaDukie]

If Duke dropped out of the ACC, half of the alums would never donate again.

Wake winning an ACC title proves anyone can do it.

[Cameron]

Your joking, right? That would be like the Lakers dropping out of the NBA to play in the D-League.

[Bob Green]

Duke dropping out of the ACC is an abominable idea.

Bob Green
Yokosuka, Japan

[LetItBD08]

that might invigorate Duke sports

Obviously football is the notable exception, but overall Duke sports doesn't need too much invigorating. The ACC usually has some of the best athletes in the country for a bunch of sports, many of which Duke is beyond competitive in. Even teams like our baseball team have really started to show signs of competition in the ACC. Although 3-12 in conference isn't the most flattering, we beat a highly ranked team three weekends in a row now, and it seems like we have a much more talented and competitive team than a year or two ago. I'm also cautiously optimistic about this football season. Let's see how our O-line and special teams come along. So much seems to depend on that.

[b&l]

I've worked too many years in strategic and tactical planning with ten to twenty-five year timeframes, where what-if's and thinking outside the box were what made scenarios churn and often emerge as highly probable. For example, a study completed more than twenty-five years ago that predicted for the year 2005 not only $40-60/barrel oil prices but factional warring in several key MidEast countries. Alas, we never ran a scenario on Duke's athletic future. Such a shame. :) I do regret interjecting thoughts into this board that are, admittedly, far beyond the near horizon. Thought some could think beyond Coach K's retirement and have fun speculating on where the road might take Duke. Didn't stimulate that kind of discussion, did it. Even got an Imus like comment. If someone has the power to delete threads, feel free to purge this one.

[-jk]

All you really need to do is listen to John Feinstein. After his Patriot league conversion (cf The Last Amateurs), he's been advocating such a new conference for a few years.

-jk

[JasonEvans]

All you really need to do is listen to John Feinstein. After his Patriot league conversion (cf The Last Amateurs), he's been advocating such a new conference for a few years.


Yes, but just because Feinstein is advocating it, that does not make it even moderately realistic.

The revenue Duke would lose by not being in the ACC would make it difficult for us to fund all the non-revenue sports that Duke has been so successful at in recent years. When I speak of money, I am not just talking about the millions we make from football TV contracts, I am talking about the lucrative ACC basketball TV contracts and the premium we get from Iron Dukes who want tickets to the ACC hoops tournament.

And one more thing, the notion of us not being in a league with UNC seems too horrible to even think about. The Duke-UNC rivalry, perhaps the greatest rivalry in all of college sports, must be preserved. Can you imagine paying $5000+ for Duke season tickets if the games with UNC, NC State, Maryland, and other ACC foes were replaced by games with Army, Navy, William & Mary, and Rice?!?!?

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!

-Jason "we have been doing better in football recruiting lately. Our pigskin program will turn around and be competative soon, I think/hope" Evans

[DevilWolf]

The last two of the "Big 4" to win ACC football championships ... Duke and Wake.

While I can see from a fan's standpoint that it would be more fun to watch us in a conference where we could be challenging for a championship every year, but from an athletic department standpoint, it's pretty nice getting an ACC check every year.

[dyedwab]

Duke leaving the ACC would be part and parcel of a de-emphasis of athletics that would have me seriously questioning how much support my alma mater will continue to get from me.

The ACC and Duke's place in it is so much a part of Duke's history that leaving would be a fundamental change in the direction of the instituion, one that I (and I think many others) would oppose.

I guess what I am saying is that this idea is not about Duke's Athletic Department, its about Duke University.

[Cameron]

Sorry about the "Imus-like" response I gave to you, b&l, as I am assuming I was who you were referring to with that, but your above ideas were beyond crazy. If Duke University ever decided to drop from the Atlantic Coast Conference and move into a Patriot League-like division, its fan base would drop along with it. Dramatically. I'm not saying I would stop being a fan, but it would be a dark, dark day in the history of Blue Devil athletics.

[Tchoupitoulas]

Tulane is a good example of how this would be a bad idea for Duke to drop out of the ACC. Tulane was in the SEC until the mid-1960s. Tulane had some decent football teams in the 30's, 40's, and 50's but then started to decline. They then totally dropped out of the SEC in about 1966. The athletic program -- on the whole -- and the school itself has suffered from that decision.

In reality, Tulane is similar is size and academic profile to Vanderbilt. Vandy however stayed in the SEC and reaps huge financial rewards for doing so. Tulane now sits in C-USA which in my opinion should be considered a mid-major conference with the Big East raiding the more prominent schools.

I also use Georgetown as an example. They are Division III in several sports (e.g., football) but remain in a high profile conference for Basketball. This is a huge draw for alumni across the country. Many of my friends who are Georgetown alums went to several games this year and to the Final Four. Lets face it, after we graduate from school, for many of us, the sports teams may be the only thing alums living across the country have to identify themselves with the University.

Tchoup.

[Lavabe]

What about a conference with Duke, Rice, Vanderbilt, Army, Navy, William & Mary, Davidson, maybe even a Georgetown, Johns Hopkins or Xavier? Rather than calling it the Southern Ivy League could call it the Kudzu Conference. Hey, just kidding. The questions is, would such a conference diminish Duke's status in sports or make its competitiveness in each individual sport any less attractive?


You just HAD to mention one of the founders of the quintessential academic- athletic conference ... the UAA, Division III's University Athletic Association. Aside from the Johns Hopkins lacrosse team, that university was one of the founders of the UAA (w/Emory, Washington University St. Louis, Chicago, Rochester, NYU, Brandeis, Carnegie-Mellon, Case Western Reserve). THEN JHU did the unthinkable... they joined the Centennial Conference, competing with the likes of Gettysburg, Dickinson, Muhlenberg, Ursinus, Franklin & Marshall, and ... McDaniel. Heretics!! Then again, JHU cut down on their travel bills by going to the Centennial.

Although I enjoy Division III football (especially at Emory;) ), I'd rather not mix Division III into any discussion of Duke.

For what it's worth, Emory is STILL undefeated in football!
Cheers,
Lavabe

[johnb]

Historically, big conferences all had one or two particularly elite private schools surrounded by large state schools (Northwestern, Stanford, Vanderbilt, Tulane, Rice, etc).

I am not sure this ever made complete financial or competitive sense, since the private schools (ps) would be unlikely to fill stadiums as readily as the huge schools (hs), and the ps tended to lose to the hs. In the boardrooms where things were/are decided, however, there might have been an overrepresentation of the ps guys, and, as importantly, an interest in maintaining a rivalry in which the hs could taunt the ps for being elitist and the ps could taunt the hs for being dumb (and each could grab some luster from the other). Does anyone know how these conferences were actually decided?

Anyway, I wonder what would have happened to Duke's spot in the ACC if K had turned out to be one of a series of bad coaches, and we had just completed our 9th consecutive year without a spot in the NCAA (after having missed 6 in a row before that). From the conference's point of view, it's nice that we have great nonrevenue sports (and they may not care if we lose lots of football games--their own schools are, therefore, winning those games) but if the basketball team goes down the tubes for long enough, I think we're toast...

[jimsumner]

"but if the basketball team goes down the tubes for long enough, I think we're toast..."

As others have pointed out, the core idea of this thread is prepostrous. I'm not sure what defines going down the tubes long enough but Duke has been playing basketball since it was Trinity College and Teddy Roosevelt was president and the school has NEVER had more than three consecutive losing seasons and that happened only once, in the 1920s. So even if your premise is true, I suspect the possibility of Duke going down the tubes in hoops for a long period of time is fairly remote.

[kydevil]

hmmm your question has lead me to wonder.... I know Duke will not leave the Acc, but say they did and went to a conference like the patriot league, I wonder how many games we would get on ESPN??? :D

[jma4life]

Bill Simmons actually recently wrote one of his ESPN magazine articles on Holy Cross' decision to leave its bigger conference and join a weeker conference with more "academically similar" schools. Simmons basically described how this absolutely killed athletics at Holy Cross and thus went on to really hurt what was once an important part of the University. Everything Simmons described would occur to the nth degree if Duke were to leave the ACC.

[Wander]

It's not like the ACC is 11 huge state schools and Duke. There's a lot of academic variety in the ACC. There's the smallish/medium sized private schools with really great academic reputations like Wake Forest and Miami. There's the public schools that also have elite academic reputations like UNC and Virginia. And then there's the more traditional big state schools like FSU and Maryland. Duke is not nearly as much of an oddball as some of you guys are making us out to be.

[NYC Duke Fan]

It's not like the ACC is 11 huge state schools and Duke. There's a lot of academic variety in the ACC. There's the smallish/medium sized private schools with really great academic reputations like Wake Forest and Miami. There's the public schools that also have elite academic reputations like UNC and Virginia. And then there's the more traditional big state schools like FSU and Maryland. Duke is not nearly as much of an oddball as some of you guys are making us out to be.

Since when does Miami have a,"Great Academic Reputation " ? It has some excellent programs like marine biology, but a ,"great academic reputation", I don't think so .

If Miami has a ," great academic reputation", then what kind of academic reputation would you say Stanford, Northwestern, Rice would have ?

[NYC Duke Fan]

THe ACC should engineer a trade with the SEC. We give you Florida State and Clemson in return for Vanderbilt and then ask Navy to join the ACC. Navy would have natural rivals in UVA and Maryland. The ACC would then be comprised of 6 private schools, ( Duke, Wake, Boston College, Miami, Vanderbilt and Navy) and 5 state schools , ( UNC, UVA, Georgia Tech, Maryland and NC.STate) It would be the Division 1 Football Conference with the highest academic reputation. Could even consider Army joining to even it out to 12.

For its out of conference football games Duke would play each year Stanford, Rice and Northwestern.

The one deal breaker that I see is that Navy and Army would never be very compettitive in basketball..( Don't they have a height restriction ?)

[gus]

The one deal breaker that I see is that Navy and Army would never be very compettitive in basketball..( Don't they have a height restriction ?)

Navy? If they have a height restriction, it must be somewhere around 7'2 (http://www.nba.com/history/players/robinson_bio.html).

[Bob Green]

The ACC would then be comprised of 6 private schools, ( Duke, Wake, Boston College, Miami, Vanderbilt and Navy) and 5 state schools , ( UNC, UVA, Georgia Tech, Maryland and NC.STate)


The United States Naval Academy (Navy) is not a private school. It is a Federal School.

However, I agree 100 % with the idea of Navy being in the ACC. I vote to dump Boston College. :)

Bob Green (active duty Navy for the past 30 years)
Yokosuka, Japan (major U.S. Navy homeport)

[CDu]

Navy? If they have a height restriction, it must be somewhere around 7'2 (http://www.nba.com/history/players/robinson_bio.html).

From what I remember, Robinson grew substantially AFTER committing to Navy. You can't be kicked out of the Navy because of height, but you can't enter over a certain height (I want to say it's 6'6" or something). But if you enlist and then grow, you can stay. Robinson is, needless to say, a RARE case.

[johnb]

In regards to my earlier email about our getting kicked out of the ACC, I tried to emphasize the "if" part, which is science fiction given the current state of our basketball program. But IF K had not recruited Dawkins, Alarie, Henderson, and Bilas, and IF we had slid into a twenty-year run of hoops mediocrity (i.e., minimal ESPN or NCAA revenues) in conjunction with a recurrently winless football team and fairly empty stadiums, I do think we might be toast in a way that larger state schools--with a fairly guaranteed fan base and admissions policies that allow a broader range of recruits--would not be. This seems substantiated by the fact that the large state schools remain top dogs in all the non-suburban sports, while the smaller schools have steadily retreated in competitiveness.

[Highlander]

What about a conference with Duke, Rice, Vanderbilt, Army, Navy, William & Mary, Davidson, maybe even a Georgetown, Johns Hopkins or Xavier? Rather than calling it the Southern Ivy League could call it the Kudzu Conference. Hey, just kidding. The questions is, would such a conference diminish Duke's status in sports or make its competitiveness in each individual sport any less attractive?


Just one note - currently Georgetown doesn't have a D-1A football program. And the last time I was there, Davidson didn't have a football program at all, just soccer.

[Indoor66]

Duke getting kicked out of the ACC is as likely as Duke resigning from the ACC. Duke is a founding member and one of it's most successful members. Duke has never been in a 20 year run of hoops mediocrity - as pointed out - only ever having one 3 year concecutive loosing year strings - and that was in the 1920's. Why the total stretch for a strawman that won't stand, even with a pole?

[Wander]

Since when does Miami have a,"Great Academic Reputation " ? It has some excellent programs like marine biology, but a ,"great academic reputation", I don't think so .

If Miami has a ," great academic reputation", then what kind of academic reputation would you say Stanford, Northwestern, Rice would have ?

You're nitpicking and completely ignoring my actual point.

[Chard]

[QUOTE=NYC Duke Fan;15009]Since when does Miami have a,"Great Academic Reputation " ? It has some excellent programs like marine biology, but a ,"great academic reputation", I don't think so .QUOTE]

Just some reading for you in case you wanted do more than just throw bombs regarding Miami.


http://www.law.miami.edu/news/645.html

http://www6.miami.edu/UMH/CDA/UMH_Main/0,1770,2472-1,00.html

http://www6.miami.edu/UMH/CDA/UMH_Main/1,1770,2472-1;2543-2;12696-3,00.html

http://fsgc.engr.ucf.edu/affiliates/um.html

Today, the University of Miami is the largest, most comprehensive private research university in the southeastern United States with a well-earned reputation for academic excellence. Nearly 15,000 undergraduate and graduate students from every state and more than 140 nations around the world call UM home during the academic semesters. The University has grown from its main location in the City of Coral Gables to the Medical campus located in Downtown Miami, the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science on Virginia Key, the John J. Koubek Center in Little Havana, the James L. Knight Center in Downtown Miami, and the South and Richmond campuses in southwest Miami-Dade county. With more than 9,400 full- and part-time faculty and staff, UM is the second largest private employer in Miami-Dade County.

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/brief/t1natudoc_brief.php

http://chronicle.com/jobs/profiles/855.htm?pg=i

The University of Miami is one of the largest private employers in Miami-Dade County with more than 9,400 full-time faculty and staff dedicated to serving one of the nation's major research universities. Its School of Medicine is an internationally renowned academic medical center that serves approximately 1,000,000 patients annually in more than 30 specialties.
The University's main campus is the administrative center of the University and houses most of the academic units. It is located on 260-acres in the City of Coral Gables, just south of Miami, also known as The City Beautiful. Coral Gables boasts a vibrant business and cultural community set in a tropical, Mediterranean environment.
Today, the University of Miami is the largest, most comprehensive private research university in the southeastern United States with a well-earned reputation for academic excellence.

[Gozza]

And I'm not just a U of M client, I'm also the President.

[johnb]

Duke getting kicked out of the ACC is as likely as Duke resigning from the ACC. Duke is a founding member and one of it's most successful members. Duke has never been in a 20 year run of hoops mediocrity - as pointed out - only ever having one 3 year concecutive loosing year strings - and that was in the 1920's. Why the total stretch for a strawman that won't stand, even with a pole?

Top 15 all-time wins in basketball:
1. Kentucky 1,849
2. North Carolina 1,808
3. Kansas 1,801
4. Duke 1,706
5. St. John's (N.Y.) 1,662
6. Temple 1,608
7. Syracuse 1,602
8. Pennsylvania 1,555
9. Indiana 1,540
10. Notre Dame 1,529
11. UCLA 1,520
12. Oregon St. 1,517
13. Utah 1,492
14. Princeton 1,475
15. Western Ky. 1,466

In a typical recent year, how good are St. John's, Temple, Penn, Princeton, and Western Kentucky?

Locate for me a school on that list (aside from Duke) that is currently competitive in either revenue sport that is also a small or mid-size academically-oriented school. I can name 1, maybe 2.

Count the smallish private schools among the top 25 schools in football, basketball, and the Director's Cup (http://www.cstv.com/auto_pdf/p_hotos/s_chools/nacda/sports/directorscup/auto_pdf/d1april4st)

I guess we can look at the Ivies and the service academies and figure their competitive demise was inevitable, but how about Tulane, Rice, Holy Cross, and SMU? We may not think they have equivalent pedigrees to ours, but tell that to Doak Walker or whoever were their local heroes.

We may now be relatively comfortable in our position within the conference, but I don't believe that this spot was preordained or that Duke is somehow fundamentally different from our peers. I also don't believe that our basketball success over the past 20 years was inevitable. With fairly small twists in the wrong direction, we could certainly have been fairly bad, and with average twists, we would have been as good as Wake or Clemson.

To us, it may seem obvious that elite players want to come to Duke, but we don't get them in football, and we used to go to top bowls. We may assume that someone like Patrick Patterson is inevitably going to select between us a few other schools, but don't forget that it is likely that every single division 1 college would have offered him a scholarship; he has a few choices. None of our current players was born when Coach K came to Duke, and we are currently recruiting high school players who weren't born when we beat UNLV in '91. History for them is Shane Battier. The fact that we also had Dick Groat or Jeff Mullins and that were were good in the 60's does not necessarily mean that we would be the most-widely followed basketball team in the country, and it doesn't mean that our nonrevenue sports would be great or that our football players would all graduate. Without funding, we'd flop. Without some luck, we'd be average. And without an academic administration that is willing to maintain several types of flexibility, we might well be out of division 1.

[RelativeWays]

Duke leaving the ACC for smaller, less green pastures is, to paraphrase Jeff Goldblum, is the worst idea in the long, sad history of bad ideas. The solution to struggling in football is to not pick up your ball, pout and go play somewhere else, that's a cop out.

[EddieRebel]

If we're going to think about crazy scenarios like Duke leaving the ACC, let's think of crazy scenarios such as Duke never leaving the Southern Conference back in 1953.

History refresher:

"The Southern Conference was born on February 25, 1921 at a meeting in Atlanta, Ga. The schools of Alabama, Auburn, Clemson, Georgia, Georgia Tech, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi State, North Carolina, North Carolina State, Tennessee, Virginia, Virginia Tech and Washington & Lee were the league's charter members. In 1922, seven more schools - Florida, Louisiana State, Mississippi, South Carolina, the University of the South, Tulane and Vanderbilt - joined the fold."

"December, 1923 - The name of the conference was officially changed to the Southern Conference. The following year, VMI joined the conference, and in 1929, Duke joined."

Out of these 23 teams, there are 7 teams that I wouldn't really care about having around: VMI, the "University of the South" (??), Tulane, Vandy, Mississippi, Mississippi State, Washington & Lee.

That would leave us with a 16 team "super-conference" which would obliterate the current Big East in all major sports: Alabama, Auburn, Clemson, Georgia, Georgia Tech, Kentucky, Maryland, UNC, NCSU, Tennessee, Virginia, Virginia Tech, Florida, LSU, South Carolina, and Duke. I would even consider dropping this down to 9 or 10 teams in an effort to let each team play each other twice (God, I miss that).

I have a sick and twisted fantasy of seeing Kentucky join the ACC, so this would fulfill that for me. Oh well, just something to think about at 1:15 in the morning.

**Edit** I forgot about Wake Forest. I can't seem to figure out when Wake Forest joined the SoCon, but surely I'd like to include them in the 16 team super-conference. See ya Hokies!
http://www.hokiesports.com/images/conference/southern.jpg

[LetItBD08]

There's the smallish/medium sized private schools with really great academic reputations like Wake Forest and Miami.

And while we're at it let's give BC some credit. I'm not sure what the perception is in most of the ACC country, but back home in the northeast it's thought of as an outstanding academic institution.

[Wander]

And while we're at it let's give BC some credit. I'm not sure what the perception is in most of the ACC country, but back home in the northeast it's thought of as an outstanding academic institution.

I agree. I was just giving examples, not a comprehensive list.

[mapei]

While I think Duke should stay where it is for basketball, I would love it if a way could be found to drop to a different conference or division for football. Duke's current football program would be a joke if it weren't so horrible as to be beyond that.

I know, I know, some of you are much more optimistic than I, but I've also been reading that optimism about Duke football off and on for years on this board.

I'm sure the other ACC schools would fight to keep the Blue Devils in ACC football, though, in part as payback for Duke beating them up (most years) in basketball.

Georgetown's football team, which is about as successful as Duke's, is D-1AA.

[johnb]

While I like to create straw men, I don't see any big changes on the horizon, but, of course, I never thought the ACC would stretch from southern Florida to Boston.

By the way, while Duke's football team doesn't win many games, we are playing the biggest and best teams in the country. If our current team played Georgetown, I don't think the game would be very close. Our players aren't as big and fast as, say Miami's, but they aren't on a different field. My impression is that Georgetown's would be.

[jimsumner]

"The Southern Conference was born on February 25, 1921 at a meeting in Atlanta, Ga. The schools of Alabama, Auburn, Clemson, Georgia, Georgia Tech, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi State, North Carolina, North Carolina State, Tennessee, Virginia, Virginia Tech and Washington & Lee were the league's charter members. In 1922, seven more schools - Florida, Louisiana State, Mississippi, South Carolina, the University of the South, Tulane and Vanderbilt - joined the fold."

I trust you realize that many of these schools had been out of the Southern Conference for two decades before the ACC was founded. The SC spawned the SEC long before it spawned the ACC. Duke and Kentucky were members of the same conference only for a couple of seasons.

[g-devil]

THe ACC should engineer a trade with the SEC. We give you Florida State and Clemson in return for Vanderbilt and then ask Navy to join the ACC. Navy would have natural rivals in UVA and Maryland. The ACC would then be comprised of 6 private schools, ( Duke, Wake, Boston College, Miami, Vanderbilt and Navy) and 5 state schools , ( UNC, UVA, Georgia Tech, Maryland and NC.STate) It would be the Division 1 Football Conference with the highest academic reputation. Could even consider Army joining to even it out to 12.

For its out of conference football games Duke would play each year Stanford, Rice and Northwestern.

The one deal breaker that I see is that Navy and Army would never be very compettitive in basketball..( Don't they have a height restriction ?)

I'm betting the SEC would take that deal in a minute and didn't you leave out Virginia Tech in your plan.

[EddieRebel]

I trust you realize that many of these schools had been out of the Southern Conference for two decades before the ACC was founded. The SC spawned the SEC long before it spawned the ACC. Duke and Kentucky were members of the same conference only for a couple of seasons.

Yeah, I realized that last night as I was reading the articles on the SoCon and SEC etc. It was all just crazy latenight dreaming really. Kind of an idealistic "what-if" scenario.

[mapei]

By the way, while Duke's football team doesn't win many games, we are playing the biggest and best teams in the country. If our current team played Georgetown, I don't think the game would be very close. Our players aren't as big and fast as, say Miami's, but they aren't on a different field. My impression is that Georgetown's would be.

You are quite right, and I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. I was just correcting the record on Georgetown, since a couple of posters had guessed wrong about which division the Hoyas are in for football. And lately their program has been as bad and disheartening, compared to their competition, as Duke's has been compared to the rest of the ACC. So it inspires similar feelings in the fan base.

Georgetown moved up from D3 to D1-AA in 1993, and actually was fairly successful in the MAAC, going undefeated one year IIRC. More recently it moved up to the Patriot League, where it has been routinely clobbered. I shudder to think how it would do in a big-time conference like the ACC.

Both programs have become embarrassing.

[jimsumner]

FYI,

Many of Georgetown's more successful football seasons came under the tutelage of former Duke QB Scotty Glacken, who passed away a few months ago.

[mapei]

In the 70s and 80s in D3, absolutely. More recently, their success in the MAAC in D1-AA came under Bob Benson.