I am dizzy.

The ACC makes a sudden power move for Miami of Florida, a team that made the National Championship game two years in a row. Lawsuits abound.

Then Virginia Tech, who filed a suit funded with Virginia taxpayer dollars and student tuition money due to the gross injustice done to other members of the Big East Conference by Miami's apparently pending departure, got an invitation to hop on the bandwagon. Suddenly, it didn't seem so wrong anymore.

As long as you're the one who's leaving, it's okay, isn't it?

And now the future appears much different. The Big East now must act to expand, because they've already lost Virginia Tech and now only have seven I-A football members (as of 2004?). They either must accelerate the Connecticut football membership or get someone from the outside. Now in retrospect it doesn't seem to be so wise to have scheduled Temple for punting. Their more immediate option was to offer Miami an incentive package to stay, and we all know that that money needs to come from somewhere. Big East fans, grab yer wallets. The TV deal's already been negotiated for the next few years.

The ACC isn't immune to this garbage at the expense of fans and students. Travel costs aren't going down in an expanded ACC, and ticket & merchandise prices are the easiest to raise to compensate. Somewhere in this forum I also read how Miami's been kind of in the red recently. They're arguably the best football program in the nation and they can't even stay solvent! Guess who covers that shortfall in the end.

I don't want my Louisville team to be a part of all this, in either conference.

Ticket prices will go up under the premise of marquee programs coming to town, and there is little outlook for competitiveness in the short or mid-term (we'll be doomats for those programs for a long time), which means less chance at watching a bowl game in December. Hey, not all BCS teams get to lucrative bowls every year. Just ask Duke, Rutgers, Temple, Syracuse, North Carolina, and Wake Forest, who have gone without bowls in some or all of the past few years. And note what conferences they all come from. Louisville may not be playing in January, but we've had a holiday season game to watch on TV the last 5 years. (Or, in my case for the first few of those years, a game to watch from the band section!)

The games before December will mean more if the Big East gobbled us up, but we can already pull some good programs to Cardinal Stadium. We won't have UAB and Houston around, but then again, the last five years we have played Florida St. (2x), Oklahoma, Colorado St. (3x), Illinois (3x), Marshall (2x), Boise St., and BYU, and they all won their respective conferences sometime in that span. We play some decent programs as it is. We do schedule Backwoods St. most every year, but lots of BCS teams do that.

James Howell's historical games and results (good site, by the way):

http://www.jhowell.net/cf/scores/Louisville.htm


One thing being lost in this whole "Louisville to BE" and "Louisville to ACC" buzz being heard in every college town in the eastern half of the US is this: What will happen to our C-USA rivalries? Southern Miss is a big football rivalry here, and fans are a tad disappointed that we don't play them this year due to scheduling. We don't care much about ECU. (They are apparently sending "representatives" to the ACC about considering them for a 12th team if Miami joins.) Memphis and Cincinnati have been decent fights the past few years.

Also, there is the problem posed by basketball as well. Marquette, Cincinnati, Memphis, Saint Louis, and Charlotte have all played us hard for several years. If you don't play them nearly every year, it's not the same. Can we just throw those rivalries away?

Apparently so. Officials high in the Louisville Athletic Department ranks, boosters, and adminstrators are supposedly drooling at the opportunity to make it in the big time.

If an invitation is offered by either the ACC or Big East conferences, officials at Louisville will without hesitation accept. Some of the fans and students, though, will have a more difficult time with it. Someone in another thread (Bullet?) mentioned correctly that Louisville is a "commuter" school. Students' college costs here (both tuition and other) are rising faster than the already torrid rate across the nation. They are sensitive to ticket prices and will simply tune to channel 41 or 840 AM to take it in for free. Non-students in Louisville are the same way, and the only people who afford any ticket price also don't tend to cheer or add the home-field advantage that we would need against these behemoth programs.

If there was a BCS conference game and no one was there, would anyone know about it?

Bird,

You make some very good points and observations. I think many of the fans in these conference wars feel as you do. I know many BC and Syracuse fans were very unhappy about the prospect of joining the ACC and losing old rivalries. Miami is looking to follow the dough and Virginia Tech got a shotgun wedding out of the deal. . . marrying into the conference which never even asked it out on a date.

The behavior of all of these conferences in reprehensible and your concerns are well understood. Miami make somewhere in the neighborhood of $9 million this year anyway. They are being guaranteed this money and if they should fail to go the the BCS bowl or championship game (you certainly can't count on the latter happening every year), the other Big East teams will likely just have to accept less of their cut. This may not even be a problem for a while as with 7 teams there will likely be less mouths to feel.

As you know, college football is expensive and is very much big business in this day and age. If Louisville joined either of these conferences, their revenues would increase tremendously, even if they never went to a bowl. Rutgers hasn't been to a bowl for 25 years, yet their affiliation with the Big East earned them enough money to break even last year in a program which supports 30 intercollegiate athletic programs. Many of these are sports are low profile and would be sadly lost without the revenues. That is the benefit the women's lacrosse or tennis player gets by coming to a school affiliated with a major conference. Increased competition will help recruiting (believe me when I say to you that Rutgers will be turning some heads in the next few years) and that ultimately breeds success, or at least increased competitiveness. With that succres, the bandwagon fans will come and your stadium will ultimately fill.

The experience of the game will not necessarily be lost by forging new rivalries. There may be some nostalgia for the old, but, as an example, Penn State left many old rivalries to join the Big Ten and in many ways are happy in their affiliation.

BTW. . . I was in the band too years ago at RU. In my opinion, the band adds a fantastic element to the experience of attending a college football game.

The above two posts have interesting and good points.

Louisville, being in C-USA, has established some excellent rivalries. If they do move, to say, the Big East, they will make new rivalries and it may take some time for many fans to digest. I could see where Pittsburgh and West Virginia could become high interest games with Louisville. It would seem to me that adding Cincinatti, history and geography wise, into the mix, helps.
Teams like East Carolina, Central Florida, Southern Miss, and Memphis have special problems in that they are just below the bar in being attractive to the more prestigious conferences. I hope the BE and C-USA, pending what develops, can re-configure for both to be more regional. Think about it--- Army and TCU, both being in C-USA? Regional idenity is crucial before all this media market stuff is taken to the extreme.

Agreed, DogsNthingys, the sense of regional identity can do wonders for a conference in the long term. Think of it as the most effective word-of-mouth advertising you can get, like having everyone know "you're in SEC country!" Louisville will have to face this fact one way or the other, as this reshuffling will ultimately lead schools, conferences, and the NCAA to review fiscal management policies and encourage more cost reduction as opposed to constant revenue increases.

Bird, we all know where you're coming from and I don't think anyone is out to diss your history, rivalries, etc. That so many people tout you as the most viable candidate for an addition is a compliment to the strength and vitality of your athletic programs. As an ACC fan I always wanted to have Louisville in the conference just to spur the ACC/SEC rivalry even more!

From my vantage point, I think there's a chance that you'll take some of your rivalries with you, particularly Cincinatti if the BE does not evolve into some oddity that recruits Xavier. If the school truly cherishes some of these ties, they'll be in a position to make demands of the BE. After all, their admittance is viewed as a saving grace. But for CUSA I imagine that there was some dissappointment that the ACC balked at inviting BC and Syracuse; The fewer the BE fb schools left the more likely that CUSA would've absorbed them into their fold, rather than lose them to another conference.

Interesting points. Card fan, you are right about ticket prices (as long as the corporate fans keep buying). At Texas, ticket prices doubled in the first 5 years in the Big 12. I do think Louisville will develop big rivalries with WVU and Pitt as mentioned above. As long as the conferences stay fairly regional (see Sun Belt, CUSA, WAC for how not to do it) new rivalries will develop. When I was in school at Texas, our biggest rivals, in order, were OU, Arkansas, Houston, A&M. Now we rarely play Ark. or UH. The A&M and Tech rivalries have grown. CU and Nebraska are always big games when we play them.

Regional is important. That minimizes the impact of the ups and downs of each school and their rivals. UH may have made a fatal mistake in telling Rice, TCU and SMU to take a hike when the SWC dissolved. They weren't big draws, but they beat Cincinnati and East Carolina. And for that matter, Louisville, even though they have been strong lately. You can't ignore TV markets (see MWC), but rivalries and travel costs are important.

And as someone made a comment about costs, there already is an NCAA committee looking at the "arms race." College presidents are very concerned about the gold plated facilities and huge contracts for coaches. The difficulty is figuring out how to control it all.

I think the regionalism and new NCAA attendance standards will become a large factor. In lieu of TV money, football relies heavily on game day sales. Some smaller schools can still draw enough fans to make the program work financially, other schools with huge enrollments have trouble filling 30,000 seats.

Seeking schools with similar programs and regional ties increases the public relations aspect, prospects for traveling to games and keeping alll stadiums full, as well as lowering costs and developing regional identity.

For these reasons I think Louisville would be better served and a great addition to the BE, especially if Cincinatti is included. The rivalry potential with WVU and Pitt seems great, and all three schools have solid, growing fan bases. The Louisville fans may miss Memphis, but that rivalry could be played out of conference, and the Cardinal faithful will likely not miss TCU, Houston or Tulane if those schools can be replaced with BC, Syracuse and UConn.