It’s time for me to come clean. A few months ago, I Franked Will into giving me a major raise to write columns for TSL. I had been offered serious bucks to write columns for GoHeels.com, and, since I am, after all, a Hokie, I decided to give Will one last chance at matching it. The new contract does not exactly put me in the tax bracket of Frank Beamer, but it does make me the highest-paid Web sports columnist covering Virginia Tech in Danville. He agreed, and I’m still around. It obviously was a devastating blow to GoHeels; look what happened to them.

Will and I met at a dingy Blacksburg bar to finalize our new deal, and after a few adult beverages Will was griping about the cigar smoke and how he was going to be able to afford to pay me, especially during the low-traffic Dead Zone months, while I was wondering how in the heck I was going to find enough topics to turn out the three columns every four weeks that I have agreed to write. Somewhere around the period of time between that when the bartender informed us the bar’s entire stock of Wild Turkey was gone and there was only enough Stoli for one more round of martinis, I had a brainstorm. We discussed my idea over the last of the Stoli, and my final words as we parted were, "I’ll call Mike Tranghese in the morning." It worked like a charm, Will. At least that’s the way I remember it.

The Conference Realignment Season has kicked off again, this time stoked by some rather pointed comments from Big East Commissioner Mike Tranghese concerning what he perceives as predatory practices by the neighboring ACC. Tranghese accused the ACC of attempting to siphon off certain BE schools in order to pump up their television revenues and reap the financial windfall available from a football championship. ACC Commissioner John Swofford responded with, "Who, me?" before the very ambiguous comment of basically "We have no interest in expansion unless we do." Here we go again.

Once again, the conference realignment chatter has other leagues circling the BE waiting to pick off the best of the bunch. There is a reason for this, that being that the BE is the weakest financially, by far, of any of the six BCS conferences. For all of the success BE teams have achieved on the football field and basketball court, and there has been plenty, it has not translated into a financial windfall for the conference.

The ACC pulls in over $80 million each year from football and basketball, a number that dwarfs the BE’s puny $50 million. Each of the ACC’s members receives a check each year for over $8 million simply for being a member of the conference. BE revenues are divided differently, especially in football, where success carries a large windfall, as opposed to the ACC football philosophy of ‘All for one and FSU for all.’ BE revenue distribution also seems to be a jealously-guarded secret, but conference football and basketball patsy Rutgers, the one BE school drawing a full football and basketball share and contributing nothing to the pot, drew a check for $3.5 million. Rest assured that Miami copped much more. ACC membership is a gold mine for its members, providing an $8 million check that buys a lot of facilities and pays for quite a few Title IX scholarships. It is hardly surprising as to which conference is attempting to raid the other.

This hasn’t been the first attempted raid of BE teams by the ACC. Many Hokies are aware of the commotion that erupted in Durham and Chapel Hill in 1999 following the infamous ‘Miami will go to the ACC’ newspaper column that summer. The hot rumor was that Miami, Syracuse and Virginia Tech were all headed to the ACC, with the announcement to be made at the league’s annual meeting. I still have the ‘Welcome to the ACC’ card and bottle of Wild Turkey given me as a welcoming gift by a Duke buddy, although the card has faded and the bottle has long been empty.

The ACC summer meetings came and went and nothing happened, and the ‘nothing happened’ part seems to be a bone of contention, with Mike Tranghese claiming Miami turned down the invitation and ACC boss John Swofford swearing that it was never offered. What is known is that mere minutes after the talk died, Tranghese had engineered Tech’s admission into the Big East for all sports over the vociferous objections of the BE’s basketball gang. This leads me to believe his version of things.

Tranghese claims that the ACC did not understand that No means No, and are at it again, and they probably are, and if they don’t succeed this time around either, will try, try, again. The cash prospects of a football championship mean that much to them, apparently enough to make a more lucrative financial offer to the Canes than the sweet one Miami has from the BE that caused them to turn down the ACC last time around, and even choose the Big East in the first place back in 1990.

This time the hot rumors have Syracuse and Boston College joining them based on television ratings potential. That seems odd considering that the Disney channels have Syracuse and Boston College under their television umbrella now and rarely televise them, as Tech and Miami flat dominate both ABC and ESPN Big East coverage and the likeliest either the Orangepersons or the Eagles will see air time is when they are playing Tech or the Canes. That will change this year as both host Notre Dame in games sure to be snatched by ABC, but things will revert back to normal in '04 when the games move back to South Bend. Maybe it is only about ratings potential rather than ratings reality; we shall see.

The prospects of Tech finding themselves left out of the upcoming conference re-shuffling has caused a stir of cries for the Athletic Director to "Do something." Just as scheduling an OOC involves a little more than faxing Penn State and telling them that we will expect their football team in Lane Stadium the first September of '05, there is more to conference realignment than simply giving SEC Commissioner Mike Slive a call and informing him that he should start re-doing the schedules now in order for them to be ready when we arrive in '06.

When you look at Tech’s situation these days, from finances to facilities to football program to fan base, we have been positioned quite nicely for any changes that might lie ahead, certainly more so than those schools whose ideas of making themselves attractive candidates to other leagues involve getting thrown out of BCS leagues, muscling their way into bowl games that didn’t want them and then sending no fans, going three years between conference football wins or even cutting a substantial number of sports. My guess is that if and when anything happens, Tech will do fine.

There have also been loud cries for Mike Tranghese to do something other than whine in the media about other conferences picking on him. Exactly what is a bit tricky. The BE has an inherent flaw of too many schools on different pages, and there is not much that can be done about it. The logical solution, for the football school to leave the BE and form their own league, dictates that all of the NCAA Basketball Tournament credits racked up recently by BE football schools, the method the NCAA uses to hand out the CBS cash, be left behind. A new league would be starting from scratch in that department, and after throwing in BE exit fees, it is not economically feasible at the moment; bolting for another league makes more financial sense for those that can escape.

It has also been suggested that the eight Big East football school Temple the six basketball ones. This is hardly likely as, under BE rules, that would require at least three of the basketball schools to vote to throw themselves out of the conference. We could only wish. BE expansion is out of the question, as the ACC’s Southern Crescent of Florida State, Georgia Tech and Clemson, along with Penn State, would be absolute idiots to leave ACC and Big 11 [another league that pays better than the BE] riches behind to join what is already the most disjointed and unwieldy conference in the BCS, and Notre Dame has no incentive to join for football; let’s face it, if the BE tried to play hardball with the Irish, they would leave and take with them what’s left of the BE bowl bids after Syracuse and Pitt get through losing them. And if NBC drops the lucrative football contract somebody else will pick it up, as the Irish remain a huge draw in an increasingly fragmented television sports world. There is not a lot for Tranghese to be proactive with.

The BE is what it is, the conference that took Tech on potential that is being realized. It is also the conference that Miami and Syracuse have done very well by, something I imagine is heavy on the minds of those involved in deciding the futures of two leagues.

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