Now that the ACC has accepted Virginia Tech and Miami, and both are ACC-bound in 2004-2005, let's take a quick look at the winners and losers in ACC expansion. You've seen everyone else's list, now take a look at ours.

You'll note that a lot of people appear on both lists.

The conference avoided making a mistake by adding Boston College and Syracuse to an expansion that was supposed to be football driven. Instead, they plucked the Big East's two best gridiron teams in Miami and VT and amped up the excitement level and value of the football portion of the conference. Good move, and they'll find that they won't regret it, from a football standpoint.

Virginia Tech football will bring excitement, intensity, big crowds, a strong fan base, and new rivalries to a league that will wonder, ten years from now, why it excluded VT from its membership for so long.

The hoops side of the ACC will no longer be able to play a complete round-robin schedule, and it will be a massive headache figuring out how to hand out ACC Tournament tickets, where to hold the tourney, how to structure it, etc. Traditional rivalries and the history of the league will be changed forever, most likely to the bad and not the good (after all, expansion watered down a once-powerful Big East basketball conference into an incomprehensible mish-mash of mostly mediocre teams).

The ACC missed out on national champion Syracuse and instead got the downtrodden Virginia Tech men's program, which is so far in the dirt that it will take years for it to recover. In Miami and VT, the league got two men's basketball programs that are nothing special, and at least one (Miami) that will never care about hoops, despite ACC membership.

On the upside, the league got a sleeping giant in VT men's hoops -- can they awaken it? The Big East couldn't.

Swofford most likely saved his job with last-second maneuvering that drove expansion through. Once his 12-team plan got away from the AD's and got into the hands of the presidents, it was Katie-bar-the-door, and Swofford got lucky that at least something got passed. Swofford will also find out in future years that he's lucky Syracuse and BC didn't get in, because the ACC would have added massive travel costs to the league and would have discovered, like the Big East, that the vaunted Boston and New York markets don't mean squat, since no one watches, anyway. And just ask bowl committees about those tiny traveling crowds for BC and SU football. When VT fans start filling up road football venues in the ACC, the league will be pleased that it wound up where it did.

The Tarheels and Blue Devils get kudos for standing on principle and saying no to expansion, but in the end, they lost. Their precious basketball conference has been watered down, but more importantly, their power has been eroded by the addition of two more teams outside the state of North Carolina. Perhaps most important of all is the tremendous amount of spite that the other ACC schools have built up over the expansion fiasco, which would have gone a lot smoother if Duke and UNC had just gone along with the crowd. As if the rest of the league didn't hate Duke and UNC enough, already.

The Hokies and Canes get to leave behind the poorly-constructed, poorly-run, horribly-managed, widespread, soulless, rudderless, basketball-driven, confusing combobulation of teams known as the Big East for a true all-sports conference in the ACC. Sure, the ACC has its own problems, of which VT and Miami will become acutely aware in the coming years, but they're far superior to the Big East in their membership, construction, and execution.

I could write an entire article about how big of an upgrade the ACC is over the Big East. And lest we forget: mo' money, mo' money, mo' money.

How big a loser this group of teams is remains to be seen. With some proactivity, clear vision, and strong leadership (in other words, a new commissioner), the Big East can survive and thrive. Mission one? Invite Louisville for all sports. Mission two? Break away from the basketball-only anchors. Mission three? Cut Notre Dame a sweetheart of a deal to be the eighth football member, whether full or partial. Keep the BCS bid and proceed from there.

This need not be a disaster for the Big East, and I'm rooting for UConn, WVU, and Pitt harder than any of the others. I respect Syracuse's behavior throughout this process, but Boston College? Sheesh.

Steger took over the president's job in early 2000, following on the heels of the very popular (with VT sports fans, anyway) Paul Togersen. Previously viewed by many (including me) as a hands-off administrator when it came to athletics, Steger stepped in when the Hokie sports programs needed him the most and piloted them through the storm to ACC safety. His strong relationship with UVa president John Casteen paid off for Tech, as Casteen was a staunch ally for the Hokies for many reasons, one of them being Steger.

Steger is taking a lot of criticism for Tech's waffling and reversal of field, particularly for making the statement in the June 8th edition of the USA Today that if an ACC invitation was given to VT "� today, we wouldn't accept it." Steger then had to go back on what he said, because (a) he was told by Virginia politicians that if VT got an ACC bid, they would have to take it; and (b) it's in the best interests of his university to do so.

Jim Weaver has the honor of sitting in the Tech AD's chair the day the ACC invitation the Hokies had wanted for 50 years finally came down. He held that position when Tech got into the Big East, and he held it when Tech got into the ACC, both of which were events that many people said would never happen.

As one message board poster pointed out, Weaver's May proposal to all other Big East teams to sign a pact saying they wouldn't leave the conference was a masterstroke. When no other schools would sign it, that left VT free to fend for itself with a clear conscience � as clear as possible in these circumstances, anyway.

Weaver was clearly in over his head throughout this whole ordeal, and at the end, he was completely out of the loop when Steger, the Tech Board of Visitors, and VA Governor Mark Warner took over. In May, during the Big East meetings in Ponte Vedra Florida, Weaver extolled the virtues of eight and nine-team conferences to the press, and how they made it easier to win national championships, when clearly ACC expansion was about security and planning for the future, not winning national championships (which wasn't enough to keep the BE from getting raided by the ACC).

On Wednesday, June 18th, the ACC dispatched GT president G. Wayne Clough to talk to Steger in Blacksburg, and when Weaver was informed of the meeting that night by a reporter, he was completely surprised, which shows you at that point that he and his athletic department were not involved in the maneuvers or the VT information loop.

Contrast that with Miami AD Paul Dee's involvement. Dee was in lock-step with UM president Donna Shalala all the way, but Weaver, when it was money time, was shut out of the process.

Granted, things had progressed to the presidential, BOV, and political level at that point, and Weaver had no role to play, but he appeared throughout the process to be caught up in forces bigger than he was.

Beamer and his staff now get to compete on equal footing for recruits in the states of Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina. Beamer gets to coach in one of the best conferences in the country, one that will have a higher profile than the very solid Big East had. This is all just another step in cementing Beamer's legacy. Plus, Coach will no doubt be invigorated by the new challenge of coaching in the ACC.

You know that empty national championship trophy case in Merryman? It's going to be that much harder to fill, particularly if the NCAA changes the rules to allow conferences with less than 12 teams to play championship games. VT's road to the MNC just got a lot harder.

Hokie fans get to see their favorite team play a lot more, given that the road venues in the ACC are so much closer. Virginia Tech has managed to take thousands of fans to such far-flung places as Philadelphia, New Jersey, New York, Boston, and Miami, so how many of them are going to descend on Winston-Salem, Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, College Park, Clemson, and even Atlanta?

Also, two words: ACC basketball. Cassell Coliseum is a great place with a decent-sized crowd in it, and attendance is bound to go up. The problem is, ticket prices are, too.

As the ACC and the Big East fought a long, protracted expansion war, besmirching the reputation of college athletics, NCAA president Myles Brand sat on the sidelines and watched, saying that it was not the NCAA's policy to get involved in conference membership matters. The NCAA's awfully good at making sure boosters don't even buy hamburgers for athletes, but when it comes to a bloody battle that shreds one conference and leaves its member institutions scrambling for survival, the NCAA looks the other way. Nice.

By intruding in the process and helping ensure that the Hokies landed in the ACC, Virginia Governor Mark Warner and Attorney General Jerry Kilgore boosted their political careers. Sure, they angered some UVa fans and alumni, but the number of Hokies who cheered their efforts vastly outnumbers a few disgruntled Wahoos. And in politics, all that matters are the numbers.

The Bowl Championship Series, while undergoing some criticism, was doing just fine. Now they have to consider what to do with a weakened Big East, and the BE is making it worse by pledging to take their time with their own expansion.

If the Big East remains in the BCS, that's going to get the litigious attention of other "lesser" conferences like Conference USA and the Mountain West Conference, but bumping the BE out of the BCS would deal a serious blow to some athletic programs who count on that revenue.

The BCS, which already had to deal with the fairness issue in deciding its new, post-2005 configuration, has now had a complicated extra variable thrown into their calculations, in the form of a weakened, shifting Big East. What a mess for them.

Talk about a guy falling into a great situation! A few months ago, Greenberg was putting up .500 records at South Florida under some heavy criticism. Now he's going to be an ACC coach. Of course, that can be a bad thing, too. Greenberg's facing some heavy competition. But recruiting just got a lot easier.

Already a loser because he was fired from his first head-coaching job, Ricky Stokes must now ponder what would have been, had he been able to hang on and coach in the ACC. It sure would have been nice to go on recruiting trips as an ACC head coach, but Stokes won't get to experience that now. Some day, maybe, but not now, and not at VT.

A simple question for you, Hokie fans -- do you want to pay $34.95 a year to read about VT having another successful recruiting year as a member of the expanded ACC, or do you want to plunk your money down to read about the Hokies, in a watered-down Big East, getting beaten out by UVa for yet another highly-rated in-state recruit?

I was sweating the outcome of this one from a business standpoint. No one wants to be writing articles about life in a non-BCS conference, competing with schools like Toledo, Louisiana-Lafayette, and UCF for recruits.

Instead, TSL gets to continue to grow and prosper, along with VT athletics. And the actual expansion process itself, as nerve-wracking as it was, was beneficial to TSL, increasing subscriber roles in the usually dead time of late spring/early summer.

Over the last 13 years, Tranghese has held together that rickety bucket of bolts known as the Big East Conference the best way he could. It finally fell apart on him, and he has to clean up the mess.

No other conference commissioner -- none -- has a job as stressful as Tranghese's (except maybe John Swofford, but only lately). He has to juggle so many different schools with so many different agendas that it must make his stomach roll at night.

Tranghese's no dummy. He knows that a true all-sports conference, not the mish-mash he presides over, is the way to go. But it's my understanding that as commissioner of the Big East, he cannot orchestrate, or even suggest, their breakup. The configuration of the league, and the decision of its member schools to stay or go or realign, is the responsibility of its presidents and AD's, not Tranghese. His job was to hold the league together, and he did that as best he could.

I can't imagine a more thankless job than being the BE commissioner, and Tranghese has done it for about 13 years now.

His comments Tuesday night in the wake of VT and Miami's departures were poignant and very classy towards Tech. He said that Tech had nothing to apologize for, that they had done everything above board, and he wished them well. He also said that the Big East would not look to punish VT and Miami by declaring them ineligible for conference championships in their last, lame-duck year in the conference, and he called VT's rise in football one of the top three or four stories of the Big East's 24-year history.

Still, no one will ever forget his speech at the Big East meetings in Pontre Vedra, Florida, in May, when everyone anticipated that he would come forth with a plan to save the league and keep Miami, BC, and Syracuse on board. Instead, he complained and criticized, appearing totally punchless at a time when he needed to come up with a roundhouse right hook. It was sad, and a sure sign that the Big East was going down, and going down hard. In the face of the ACC's plans, Tranghese had no response. That, and other things, put him squarely on the losing side of the ledger in ACC expansion.

Frank Moseley was Virginia Tech's athletic director and football coach from 1951 to 1960, and after giving up coaching after the 1960 season, he continued as Virginia Tech's athletic director until 1978.

Moseley is a giant figure in the history of Virginia Tech athletics. He revived a moribund Virginia Tech football program in the early 50's, taking them from a team that won just one game from 1948-1950 to a winner, including an unprecedented 8-0-1 season in 1954 (just the second undefeated season in VT history at the time, and the first in the modern era; the 1917 Hokies went 7-0-0).

As athletic director in the late 1950's and 1960's, Moseley oversaw the construction of the sports facilities that would carry Tech to the year 2000 and beyond. On his watch, the Hokies built Cassell Coliseum (called "The Coliseum" for years), Rector Field House, a new baseball park (where Tech's football practice fields are now located), and of course, Lane Stadium.

But for all he did, Moseley had one goal and vision for Virginia Tech that he never achieved: ACC membership. When the original ACC schools broke away from the Southern Conference in 1953, they did not take Virginia Tech with them, as detailed in TSLMail a couple of weeks ago. For the remainder of his time in Blacksburg, Moseley tried to get VT into the ACC, to no avail. In 1977, near the end of Moseley's tenure as athletic director at Virginia Tech, the Hokies were put up to a vote and fell well short of the number of votes needed to join. The ACC voted to include Georgia Tech in 1978, and the ACC and Virginia Tech parted ways for good.

Until now. VT wandered the conference landscape, lost, going through the Metro Conference, the Atlantic 10, and the Big East, before finally achieving Moseley's dream: the ACC.

Many men and women are responsible for Virginia Tech athletics being what it is today, and the large majority of them are still with us to enjoy this historical event in Virginia Tech sports history. Frank Moseley is not.

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