![]() Right now, it looks like a lateral move for them. O'Brien knew that he had better long term odds building a big time program in Raleigh than he did staying in Boston.īoston College should have never left the Big East. When Boston College's coach, Tom O'Brien, left BC to go to an inferior squad at NC State, his point resonated with Tribal Fever. ![]() College sports play second fiddle at best in the big Northeast media markets. Then, they scaled back to Boston College. The ACC had big dreams when they expanded. It's time for all these conferences to stop looking at the "big" national picture and focus on creating a great conference with good rivalry possibilities that can grow within the conference and create a story that can be understood outside of the conference. We at Tribal Fever will cover whatever package these teams come in. However, we don't believe that the ACC or the Big East are properly structured to even come close to the kind of fervor that the SEC generates, at least not on the gridiron. ![]() If you are a fan of college sports living in the Footprint, then you have to follow the SEC, the ACC, the Big 12, and the Big East? Let's also not forget that both Conference USA and the Sun Belt have legitimate teams, some of which have team that are better than the lower ranks of the bigger conferences. The much smaller Sun Belt Conference also emerged around several Southern schools looking to make the jump to Division I status in football. This conference had no fully shifted from its roots as a midwestern conference to a Southern one. (They also added basketball only schools from C-USA, Marquette and Depaul.) Now the Big East had 8 football schools, 16 basketball schools, and Notre Dame in basketball only.Ĭ-USA responded by adding the remnants of the old Southwest Conference that didn't go to the Big 12 along with Marshall and the University of Central Florida (UCF) who were misplaced in the MAC Conference. ![]() This led the Big East, founded as a basketball conference, to raid Conference USA (C-USA) of Louisville, South Florida (USF), Cincinnati. Boston College was only added after a huge, but failed, effort to land Notre Dame. In 2004-2005, the ACC raided the Big East grabbing Miami, Virginia Tech, and Boston College. Adding one dominant team in the early 1990's (Florida State) was not enough. Historically the best basketball conference in the South, the ACC decided it wanted to get better at football. Things stayed stable for a while until a few years back when the ACC decided to take a page out of the SEC's playbook. Another midwestern conference, the Big Eight, jumped into the breach and stole away the four top Texas teams (Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, and Baylor) creating the Big 12, with two divisions and a title game a la the SEC. When Arkansas departed for the SEC, the wounded Southwest Conference disbanded. That conference had a group of Texas schools and Arkansas. The next domino to fall was the disbanding of the Southwest Conference. However, the SEC upped the ante considerably. The SEC was supposedly following the Big Ten's lead, a conference that had recently added Penn St. Second, the SEC signed a national TV contract with CBS, a network looking to chip away if only slightly on ABC's longtime domination of college football. First, they expanded to 12 teams adding Arkansas (from the Southwest Conference) and South Carolina (an independent), split the conferences into two divisions, and created an SEC title game. The SEC changed everything when they followed NASCAR's lead, exposing their passionate fan base to the nation at large. Back then, college sports was more than happy to be a regional attraction. It used to be that there were three main conferences, the SEC, the ACC, and the Southwest Conference, with a whole lot of solid independents mixed in. The college football conference landscape in the Footprint has become downright confusing. Now that Swampland Sports has launched Tribal Fever (TF), our dispatch dedicated to college sports in the South, we figured it was time to do weigh in on the current state of college football conferences. A Modest Proposal: Southern College Conference Realignment
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