Invitation coming Eagles' way?
ACC seems headed in that direction
A series of conference meetings around the country yesterday brought the Atlantic Coast Conference closer to issuing an invitation to Boston College as the conference's 12th team and the Big East closer to formalizing plans for its restructuring.
But as has been the case since these conference reconfigurations began last spring, nothing that happened yesterday was clear-cut.
Meanwhile, the Mid-American Conference yesterday issued an invitation of full membership to Central Florida, pending a decision by the Big East to extend the Golden Knights any type of membership invitation in football and basketball.
While that was happening, a scheduled meeting of six Big East presidents and four athletic directors at the Newark Airport Marriott hotel brought the conference closer to formulating a plan to expand to a 16-team superconference in basketball and an eight- or nine-team league in football.
In Charlottesville, Va., the ACC athletic directors concluded a two-day meeting in which they announced tentative scheduling plans for the 2004 and 2005 football seasons, based on an 11-team league that almost everyone in the Big East, MAC, and ACC believes will expand to 12 by the end of November at the latest.
In the middle of all of this is BC, which, with Notre Dame out of the ACC picture, is the only readily acceptable candidate as the ACC's 12th member. Whether the Eagles would accept such an offer remains uncertain, although sources in both conferences concede BC is the only logical choice.
Just what the Eagles do if and when they are asked -- and that could be in the next few weeks -- will determine what Central Florida does, and obviously what actions the Big East takes.
Publicly, few words of substance were being uttered. "We had a very productive meeting today about the future of the Big East conference," said commissioner Mike Tranghese in a statement issued late yesterday by the Big East office. "Our current members have been extremely supportive over the past several months and recommitted themselves to each other. We will now focus our collective energies on reconfiguring the league. We will specifically focus our attention on retaining our status among the top six football and basketball conferences and maintaining our automatic berth in the Bowl Championship Series."
A translation: The Big East has two plans. One has BC as a member along with the addition of Cincinnati and Louisville in basketball and football and DePaul and Marquette in basketball. The other is without BC and has not been fully discussed yet but reportedly includes South Florida or Central Florida as the additional member in football and basketball, with the other Florida school (probably Central Florida) as an affiliated member in football only.
Those at yesterday's meeting -- Tranghese, the presidents of Georgetown, Villanova, Syracuse, St. John's, and Pittsburgh, as well as BC president Rev. William P. Leahy, S.J., and the athletic directors from Syracuse, Rutgers, Seton Hall, and Georgetown -- also concluded that the exit fee for any conference school should be increased significantly, but not the $10 million some had suggested. A fee of $5 million seems more reasonable.
The ACC's stance on expansion remained muted as well, as it dealt with the complicated issue of scheduling 11 teams in football and basketball in one division, rather than a simpler two-division plan of six teams each.
"We're an 11-team league right now," said ACC assistant commissioner Mike Finn. "All of the models that we did were based on 11 teams."
The key words are "right now." Almost everyone agrees the ACC needs the extra $8 million to $10 million that a conference championship football game would generate to make the expansion plan palatable to everyone. NCAA rules require a minimum of 12 teams for such a contest.
While BC has heard nothing official from anyone in the ACC, the Eagles are acknowledged as the primary candidate by sources in both leagues. In their abbreviated courtship last spring, the Eagles fell a vote shy of the seven votes (out of nine) needed for acceptance. Yesterday, ACC commissioner John Swofford acknowledged that the league was considering a change in the by-laws, reducing the percentage of votes needed for acceptance from 75 percent to 66 percent. Such a change would almost guarantee the Eagles would have the necessary votes.
The time frame for all of this to be completed remains within the next two months.
