Despite this latest football-driven expansion effort, the ACC prides itself on being a conference that cares about more than just football. They care about academics, graduation rates, opportunities for women in athletics, and overall quality of their athletic programs, among other things.

Given all that, how does VT stack up to the rest of the ACC in those areas? To find out, we researched data relating to all those areas, plus athletic revenue and expenditures, to see how VT matches up against the current membership of the ACC.

We looked up info in the following categories:

• Athletic Revenue
• Athletic Expenditures
• Number of Men's Sports Offered
• Number of Women's Sports Offered
• Total Sports Offered
• Directors' Cup Standing (formerly Sears Cup)
• USNWR (US News and World Reports) Academic Rankings
• 4-year Football Graduation Rate
• 4-year Men's Basketball Graduation Rate

We researched that data for Virginia Tech and the nine current ACC teams: Clemson, Duke, Wake Forest, Georgia Tech, Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia, Florida State, and NC State.

(We also researched the data for the other three proposed entrants into the ACC: Miami, Boston College, and Syracuse. That data is not discussed here but is included in a linked web page and Microsoft Excel spread sheet -- see the bottom of the article.)

We ranked the Hokies in a "ten-team ACC" consisting of VT and the current nine ACC members, to see how Tech ranks against the ACC teams. We'll give a snapshot of how VT did, and then will break down each category individually.

Despite what opponents of VT's inclusion in the ACC would have you believe, the Hokies aren't a disaster when matched up against the rest of the ACC. In most instances, VT finishes near the middle of the pack when ranked against the current ACC members, with three notable exceptions, two negative and one positive.

1.) VT is dead-last in the Directors' Cup ranking, formerly called the Sears Cup.

2.) VT is next to last in football graduation rate.

3.) VT is third in men's basketball graduation rates.

Notes:

1.) Revenue, expenditures, men's sports offered, and women's sports offered were from the 2000-2001 academic year, which is the most recent data available from the Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle is due to release its info for 2001-02 any day now.
Link: http://chronicle.com/stats/genderequity/

2.) Directors' Cup Standings were for the 2002-2003 academic year just completed, as calculated by the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics (NACDA).
Link: http://nacda.ocsn.com/directorscup/current/div1/final/div1-0203final.html

3.) US News and World Reports rankings were taken from the USNWR web site on 6/24/03, for national universities with doctoral programs.
Link: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/ranknatudoc_brief.php

4.) Football and men's basketball graduation rates were taken from the NCAA's web site and are from the NCAA's 2002 graduation rates report. The quoted graduation rates are a 4-year average of the classes that entered each institution from 1992-93 to 1995-96.
Link: http://www.ncaa.org/grad_rates/2002/d1/index.html

Let's break down the data for each individual category.

Revenue is one indicator of a school's ability to compete with its peer institutions. Better-funded programs can spend more on facilities, recruiting, and scholarships.

You can see that VT is very comparable to most ACC teams in athletic revenue. Only UNC and Clemson possess a significant advantage of $5 million or more over VT. And remember, VT's athletic revenue continues to increase, with South end zone expansion now complete and Hokie Club donations continuing to rise.

Athletic expenditures are one indicator of a school's willingness to compete, not just in football, but in all sports. Universities that spend a lot on sports are funding more sports, more scholarships, higher coaches' salaries, better facilities, better travel arrangements, larger recruiting budgets, and more.

VT doesn't fare as well in expenditures when matched up against ACC schools. One can assume that most of the disparity comes from scholarship funding, which is critical to the success of Olympic, non-revenue sports. VT doesn't fund the maximum number of scholarships in all of the sports it offers, whereas UVa, for example, either does or is just a couple away from it, if I remember correctly an old article I read.

Virginia Tech is only now in a position to increase expenditures, after years of having low revenue due to poor conference affiliation and lost revenue sharing.

Note that just because a university offers a sport doesn't mean that it fully funds it, has good facilities, has a good travel budget, pays the coaches well, or offers the maximum number of scholarships.

Boston College, for example, offers an incredible 34 sports, 12 more than the average ACC school offers (and 13 more than VT). But with athletic expenditures of "only" $34 million, it's highly unlikely that BC funds very many of those sports well.

Again, VT is competitive with the rest of the ACC. One sport the ACC participates in, and does well in, that VT doesn't offer is men's varsity lacrosse. But even then, only four ACC schools field teams (UNC, UVa, MD, and Duke).

One big difference between VT and the top ACC schools, such as UNC and Duke, is that VT typically doesn't fund as many scholarships as ACC schools do in Olympic sports. Tech is gradually improving in that area as revenues rise and the Hokies are better able to fund more sports more completely (VT's approach, in my estimate, has been "facilities first, scholarships second").

One VT program that does have full scholarship funding -- the men's golf team -- would be one of the better teams in the ACC, were the Hokies to join the conference today. One sport that would not be very competitive is baseball -- the ACC is an outstanding baseball conference. Tech women's basketball would do well in the ACC.

Here's where the Hokies take a beating. The Directors' Cup, which is awarded by the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics (NACDA), used to be called the Sears Cup, until Sears quit sponsoring it last year.

The Directors' Cup (DC) is an all-sports award. According to the NACDA web site:

[The Directors' Cup is] a program that honors institutions maintaining a broad-based program, achieving success in many sports, both men's and women's. Began in 1993-94 for Division I by NACDA and USA Today, it was expanded in 1995-96 to include Division II, III and the NAIA.

Each institution is awarded points in a pre-determined number of sports for men and women. The overall champion is the institution that records the highest number of points in their division's NACDA Directors' Cup standings.

I'll leave it up to you to check the link above to see what sports are scored, how the scoring is done, etc. Here are the hot-off-the-presses results for the 2002-3 academic year.

There's no dressing that pig up -- VT doesn't do well when the sum total of its sports programs are measured using the Directors' Cup methodology.

The only excuse for VT is that the Hokies have bounced from conference to conference with poor revenue sharing, or none at all, for many years, while the ACC has been strong, cohesive, and lucrative for 50 years now. The stability and revenue that ACC members have enjoyed for five decades has allowed many of them to field strong sports programs across the board.

The Hokies have reached a high of 63 twice in the Cup's ten-year history, but otherwise have never been ranked higher than 86, and typically Tech finishes in the 90's.

It's worth noting that within the Big East, the Hokies do very well. In the latest Big East Commissioner's Trophy standings, which is the league's measurement of all-sports proficiency, the VT men finished 2nd (out of 14 schools), and the women finished 7th (out of 14).

In the men's division of the BE Commissioner's Cup standings, BC finished 7th, Syracuse 12th, and Miami 14th. In fairness to Syracuse and Miami, two of their better sports -- Syracuse men's lacrosse and Miami baseball -- aren't part of the league.

Regardless of what happens with ACC expansion, the Hokies, provided their current level of revenue keeps coming in, should set as their goal to be more competitive in more sports, improving that ranking to consistent Top 50 finishes by the year 2010.

Everyone argues about the validity of the USNWR academic rankings of institutions, but it's an easy way to paint the academic rating of a school with a broad brush.

USNWR ranks 249 national universities with doctoral programs. On their web site, they say:

There are 249 universities in the country (162 public and 87 private) that offer a wide range of undergraduate majors as well as master's and doctoral degrees; many of the schools on this list strongly emphasize research.

That category includes all of the schools found in your typical BCS conference, and most Division 1 institutions.. They are ranked in the following manner: The top 50 are ranked by number, and after that schools are lumped together, unranked, into "tiers." Tier 2 is a group that is academically superior to Tier 3, while Tier 3 is superior to Tier 4.

In the USNWR rankings, the Top 50 is actually the Top 51, because of ties. After that:

Tier 2: #52 through #129
Tier 3: #130 through #194
Tier 4: #195 through #249

Again, you can see that when it comes to academics, VT is no embarrassment to the ACC and is ranked right there with many of the institutions in the conference. I'd even wager that the Hokies might be the highest-placed of the five Tier 2 schools listed.

I wrestled with what graduation rate statistics to include. Should all athletes be included? Just football? Just basketball? And what graduation statistics should be included?

I decided to include football and men's basketball, since the most attention is paid to these two sets of graduation rates. I used the NCAA's latest figures for the four-year average graduation rate, from the 1992-93 freshman class through the 1995-96 freshman class.

Graduation rates, like academic rankings, are very complicated to calculate and are the subject of widespread debate as to their worthiness as a benchmark for comparison. In any event, let's take a look. The Hokies didn�t do well in football, but they did well in basketball.

This is not a good ranking for the Hokies -- ninth out of ten teams. At least they're only getting blown away by a few ACC teams: Duke, UVa, Wake, and maybe UNC. Once you get below UNC, each school is just one good class or one bad class away from leapfrogging the others, in either direction.

VT does very well in this statistic, and you have former head coach Bill Foster to thank for that. Foster coached the VT men's team from 1991 through 1997, so the 46% graduation rate is all his doing, and that of his athletes. He had a strong core of players for years that played for four years in the program, and obviously, a fair number of them graduated.

The bad news is, look for that statistic to plummet to near-zero for the Hokies in the coming years. The amount of program attrition during the tenures of Bobby Hussey (1997-99), and in particular Ricky Stokes (1999-2003), has been staggering. Right off the top of my head, the only player I can think of who graduated in the last six years is Andre Ray, and perhaps Brian Chase, who just finished four years of eligibility at VT.

Don't buy into the notion that VT would be an embarrassment to the ACC, either academically or athletically. In general, the Hokies are behind most ACC institutions in most measurements, but if they enter the ACC and get 5-10 years of good conference stability, strong competition, and revenue sharing that allows them to build their programs, the Hokies will find themselves moving quickly up the ACC ranks in all categories.

It's just a matter of time, time that the ACC schools have had, and VT hasn't.

To view the data (including rankings for Miami, BC, and Syracuse) in HTML (Web page) format, click here:

http://subscription.techsideline.com/tslpass/2003/vtandacc.htm

To download the data in Microsoft Excel 97 format, click here (right-click and do a "Save As" if desired):

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