And, quite frankly, it doesn’t thrill me.
… The switch would shore up a struggling athletics department’s finances, but angered some alumni and fans by leaving behind longstanding rivalries and tradition within the ACC.
Multiple individuals with knowledge of the situation told The Post that the Board of Regents had received no formal briefing of the situation as of Monday morning, but were expected to speak with University President Wallace Loh on an afternoon conference call. The regents then reconvened via telephone on Monday morning to vote.
Earlier this year, Maryland eliminated seven varsity sports due to the department’s multimillion-dollar deficit, and now will be subject to a $50 million exit fee from the ACC…
A group of people tasked with the responsibility of monitoring the affairs of a charter member of a long-standing, storied athletic conference watches as its administration runs its athletic department into the ground with a series of bad decisions and then elects to take the money and run with “no formal briefing of the situation”. Screw the fans. Screw the alumni. See you on cable TV.
How many ways do you need to hear it from those in charge of the sport we love before you get the message? Our passion means nothing. Only our wallets count.
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UPDATE: The regents were given two whole days to make the decision.
“If I were a policy maker in government, I would be taking a hard look at this right now,” he said. “I don’t think these conferences should be telling our great universities how to handle their governance matters.”
They’ll get right on that after they cash the first check.
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UPDATE #2: Brian Cook looks at the move from the other side of the cloud.
Get The Picture 
Well, I “get the picture”, and it ain’t pretty. CFB will need ol’ Lady Luck to smile down on it to get through the mess I fear is coming.
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I am more amazed at the cable issue. wasn’t the flop of the longhorn network enough to debunk the myth that teams or leagues can simply present cable systems with a bill. is the maryland fan base so large in the DC area that they would scream bloody murder if the big ten network were NOT part of basic cable? keep in mind the big ten network airs the 5th or 6th best game of the day.
I can assure you that rutgers football is NOT EVEN on the radar of NYC residents. now seing as its NYC, every time Michigan or Wisconsin come here to play, they will sell out their stadium, but one could use the same argument for adding them to the SEC given the number of sports bars that fill up with SEC teams.
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The irony here is that there is virtually no Maryland fan base. I can assure you that Maryland football is not even on the radar of DC residents, either.
Amazing and truly craven overreach by the Big 10, this is. –Yoda
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Craven, certainly. Amazing — I’m never amazed by the tactics of Boss Tweed who is running that outfit.
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national champs 1958 I could be mistaken—-time flies
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’58? Wasn’t that also one of Auburn’s many unclaimed championship years?
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On the most basic level, these folks equate money and passion.
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Hard to see the Big Ten being done here with Rutgers and MD.
A Duke-UNC combo pack would be a good fit, except they dont expand the footprint well enough. So you work out a deal to add GT and UVA while NC State and Va Tech move to the SEC. FSU and Miami/Clemson move to the Big 12.
The ACC is essentially reformed as the Big East with the North Carolina schools added in. The ACC/BigEast football programs will continue to languish in obscurity with only 15-20 million payouts as payouts in the Big 10,12, SEC and PAC 12 continue to expand.
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Duke and Carolina won’t leave., unless the universe totally shifts. They ARE the ACC.
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i don’t see UVA or WF leaving either—actually I don’t see Duke or NC state leaving !
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Very true NC Dawg. The universe is, however, currently shifting for UNC in the form of numerous scandals that seem to be migrating from the perpetually mediocre football program to the hallowed basketball program. Could be an interesting turn of events for UNC and the ACC.
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There is zero chance the flagship university of one of the fastest growing states in the country ever gets left standing out in the cold. UNC will always be a major player (and I’m a Duke alum saying this).
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The constant drum beat about killing college football tradition gets tiring. There is nothing you can do to stop this train. Universities jumping conferences, the total disregard of traditions and rivalries, expansion of the playoff system, etc. It is all coming. Why don’t you try looking at some positive aspects of the changes instead of complaining?
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Because that’s what blogs are for 🙂
Simply, there are some of us that appreciate the traditions for what they are. There is something right about them. It’s sad when they change. I’m sad I won’t be watching A & M and UT play this Thursday night. I enjoy that on a full belly of turkey.
Just because it’s a very fast train doesn’t mean it’s the right train. Don’t think it can’t happen. A 16-team playoff would destroy what we now know and love. Games would be regional friendlies but not must-see-TV for the nation. Conference championships would become to mean very little except for pride. Just like winning the division in the NFL. All that matters is how you play in January.
That’s why some of us are sad to see it all happening. We just don’t want to lose the sport we love.
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Because at some point I’ll just become emotionally detached and walk away.
I give it 10 years, max.
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sadly, I’m much closer to the same sentiment and response.
After 35 years as a season ticket holder, the money grubbing combined with the option of seeing every game on tv makes it increasingly difficult to justify renewal.
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Amen, Senator!
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No matter how shitty it gets.. at the end of the day, when you get the chance to step inside Sanford Stadium on an October afternoon and watch the team you’ve loved for years play, you’re gonna do it. I get a lot of stuff is changing and most of it sucks, but what won’t change is that feeling. (You said as much earlier this year, I believe, in relation to the Florida game, but could be wrong)
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Thirty-five years ago, I used to say the exact same thing about ACC basketball. Those days are long gone now.
Don’t get me wrong – I’ll still watch a few games. But care enough to travel and blog about it like I do now? I can’t see it.
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I feel the same way in reference to ACC basketball. Was a huge fan and went to many games, no interest now, not the same game Jeff Lamp and Lee Raker played.
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Sounds like a “take your ball and go home” reaction.
Have some faith Senator, the 4 team 2014 playoff isn’t even set up yet! Ain’t nothing like being a Bulldog on Saturday night!
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I don’t think we have 10 years of normalcy left Senator, we will all be making decisions differently. Corporate, political, and academic leadership has been compromised for decades now, and you cannot lay it all at the door of greed. If JFK were to write his “Profiles in Courage” treatise today, even if expanded beyond the political arena, it would be a very small volume.
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I was privvy to a talk by a GT professor regarding online higher education. This guy knows his stuff and said that he once thought moving away from brick and mortar universities would take a couple of generations. Now, with accelerated technology, the changes are coming so rapidly they are blinding. This equates with the money grab of college football, network contracts and the expansion of the conferences. The horse is out of the barn and is headed towards a full gallop. We might not recognize college football in less than five years. The oligarchs are that greedy.
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Absolutely. Think of it and “Hope and Change” for college football. We have to pass the playoff to see what’s in the playoff.
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Nancy knows there’s no way she’s going to pass anything as the House minority leader for the 113th Congress but that’s not going to stop her and the rest of her krewe from having a good time anyway
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Until proven otherwise, I think this is “subtraction by addition”. Maryland football is a dumpster fire right now. Other than really bad uniforms I don’t see what they bring to the “Big we’re not sure what the number is now” conference. No one in the East/Northeast even cares about college football, much less Maryland or Rutgers. If they think they are bringing in new big markets, I am not a believer at this time. I live in the Northeast and believe me there are few true college football fans here. Maybe that will grow but I have trouble seeing how bringing in a terrible Maryland team will help. Of course I am wrong more than right, just ask my ex wife.
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“We’ve got to look to the future.” For uncharted waters…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/colleges/randy-edsall-has-maryland-entering-unchartered-waters/2012/02/16/gIQArzdAIR_story.html
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Who among us should doubt that the Leaders and Legends cannot chart a just and equitable course!
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It has been all over the DC sports radio and the fans are apalled. Oh well. Who cares about the fans anyway.
BTW MD is not really a DC team. The football focus is VT/UVA/WV Basketball is UVA/MD and others. There is a big Lacross market. Maybe the Big 10 is trying to break into that.
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Turn in your prep school credentials please, Pat, it’s lacross(E):lol: And does this action by the Board of Regents not smack of what went on at Ped St? I’m not equating the two, but just comparing their pig-headed go-it-alone M.O.
Well, at least the Terps can now renew the onetime rivalry with PSU. They’ll have their chances to improve upon their 1-35-1 record.
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LAX I forgot soccer too.
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if not for title 9 Rugby would be the up and coming sport
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Yep, right behind lacrosse 😉
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Damn smileys — 😆
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When they show up to tell cablevision, time warner, and verizon’s fios that they want to be on basic cable and they want a bump in per subscriber fees, I am not sure they are going to get it.
as an fyi, i have fios in NYC and i get Big ten network for “free”, but for timewarner or cablevision it is an add on that someone can choose to pay for (i would willingly NOT have BTN in my cable bill) as part of many other channels in a sports tier. as a point of reference, the btn charges $1 per sub per month in big tem markets and $0.10 outside of their defined market
the network (i.e., the big ten) can ONLY extract that fee from the operator IF the operator is willing to pay for it. the operator is NOT going to pay for it if they don’t think their customer base wants or needs it or they can easily pass the increase on to their cable subscribers. these battles often get nasty with big PR and advertising campaigns when it involves real networks that people actually care about.
http://host.madison.com/sports/college/football/dish-agreement-with-big-ten-network-falls-through/article_1329c574-ff33-11e1-aa5b-001a4bcf887a.html
how well do you think that debate is going to go in NYC? don’t lose your access to rutgers football…most New Yorkers did not know they had access to rutgers football in the first plac
by contrast, while I am sure adding mizzou and A&M is part of an SEC plan to launch its network, it was really about adding the households to the territory for purposes of adding viewers and negotiating a bigger deal with cbs and espn. by the way, can we get a refund on mizzou? can we dump these clowns and call the whole thing a mistake? we can wax nostalgic about jarvis’ great game and mike slive flying from college station to columbia in a single day, and we call all agree that adding a second Ole miss without the grove and racial history was a mistake?
More broadly, ESPN has to know that ratings for rutgers and maryland football are terrible and would not up their payment to big 10 thinking that DC and NYC are suddenly going to become “big ten” markets. they are going to look at viewership by conference and when the needle barely even moves with maryland and rutgers, they are going to tell delaney to go fly a kite when he tries to claim DC and NYC.
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To your last point — I’m trying to figure out how this deal adds value to the ABC/ESPN package and I can’t — what game involving Rutgers or UMD are they going to want to broadcast nationally? I can’t think of one. If anything this actually makes the whole thing less valuable, since you’ve now got Maryland-Ohio State where Ohio State-Nebraska used to be, and so on.
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If adding TAMU and Mizzou to the SEC didnt add value, there isnt much a conference can add that does add value. Really you just create more inventory, which should make the inventory cheaper. Anyway, this admins should just get back to expensive lunches and boozing it up in luxury boxes because the pros on the TV side are likely to take their lunch money if this continues.
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I am worried more about these admin/boards/trustees are currently swimming with the sharks. they are running around half cocked dreaming of ways to get more money from TV, but they dont seem to run the numbers before hand.
If the SEC is having difficulty getting more money from TV by adding new “markets” how are other conferences going to do it.
Just seems like a bunch of grown men pulling out their rulers to see who is biggest and hoping that it doesnt get weird. /hint it always does.
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Sorta like PSU, no?
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Will Maryland be joining the Declining Population Division or the Government Bailed Out Industries Division?
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Maryland has no preference and expects that either will be better than the Let Them Go Bankrupt Division
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You understand they DID go BK right?
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Sounds somewhat familiar…
“Secondly, while Romney backed ‘a managed bankruptcy,’ he expressly did not back the essential concept of government-provided debtor-in-possession financing, offered to GM and Chrysler while they were in bankruptcy. No one else would finance the companies with the U.S. near a depression. Without U.S.-backed DIP financing, these two and many of their U.S. suppliers most likely would not have survived.”
http://www.thestreet.com/story/11746014/2/one-more-time-parsing-let-detroit-go-bankrupt.html
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I’m curious how long the B1G has been contemplating this move. If it has been any longer than 6 months, why wasn’t Missouri ever pursued back when they became a Big XII volleyball?
Missouri is several degrees more attractive than Rutgers, and may arguably be more attractive (for B1G purposes, at least) than Maryland.
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Good points. Think at the time Missouri was trying to escape from the University of Texas, Delany may have been preoccupied with luring Notre Dame. In any event, Bill Connolly and Rock M Nation have great background information on Missouri’s Big-10 aspirations before it looked to the SEC. Have no idea how Rutgers pulled off its escape but guess that has been in the works for awhile
http://mgoblog.com/diaries/big-ten-expansion-and-what-it-means-notre-dame-and-big-east
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I suspect Notre Dame’s deal with the ACC is part of what’s driving the new offers to Maryland and Rutgers.
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Right. For all the “Delany is a cynical genius” arguments out there, the one thing that seems undeniable to me is that this whole game — announcing it, discussing with 20 different teams, signing on with a playoff — was a destabilizing move to get ND to join the Big Ten. Instead, it set off an arms raze, where everyone started adding teams that didn’t make sense because there is safety in numbers. Once those gears started turning ND was all of the sudden flush with options to affiliate. Thus the game was lost, and now Delay is forced to play the final innings of this stupid numbers game that he started, and boom now you’ve making moves that literally no one is happy about. Hooray college sports.
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And what’s driving Maryland’s desire to exit the ACC.
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Money, money money m o n e y.
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Good post and info.
The post by MGo however already is a little dated with the BCS considerations; the Big East is lumped into the ‘Group of 5’ non-contract bowls in the new regime, and ND has its own slot guaranteed in the Orange Bowl. I don’t think ND would ever get hitched to them with all of the changes… if and when they do look to move, it’ll be part of the next big jump to 16 team conferences.
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Not so fast. What they really care about is TV money and Rutgers brings a much better market (New York/northern NJ) into play than Missouri (St. Louis/Kansas City).
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It’s not such a good market if the following in the NY metroplex for Rutgers is nominal. And it is, as I understand the lay of the land.
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If you think TAMU and MIssou didn’t add value to the SEC then please let me hit your flask. Do not get me wrong, on this I am the senators’ aide.
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Johnny One-Year has caught Tejas attention, with that comes money, attention… All of that is good for us. It will be interesting to see next year when teams are keying on him.
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I just cancelled my cable after reviewing (A) how much we’re paying a month for it and (B) how infrequently we ever watch live TV anymore.
So, what happens to all of these conferences when their cable cash flows erode? I know it sounds ludicrous to think about, but my kids do not watch TV for more than 10 minutes. They’re off texting or jumping into a video game on-line with their friends. I can see this whole model falling apart pretty quickly if it’s all justified by cable subscriber fees.
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I just did the same thing, and I don’t think it sounds ludicrous at all. Being out of state, I’ve had to resort to watching the Dawgs play online from a pirated broadcast a couple of times, and I’m not talking about ESPN3. It seems to me that this trend is growing, and it is getting easier to find these games broadcast over the internet. You almost get the feeling that we are with college football now like the music industry was a couple of months before Napster burst on the scene. Those cash flows are going to erode the way the music and movie industry’s did.
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ESPN, of all cable channels, has the leverage to sell individual online subscriptions, but has no incentive to be the leader or to undermine ABC’s other cable channels.
Deregulation will lead us down this path however, sooner or later
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Cancelled the Dish 4 years ago & no regrets. Between Netflix & the interwebs, I stay entertained. Plus it’s more fun to watch a big game out or with friends & fambly.
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I get eliminating all the extra boxes and watching shows after they have aired (watch all those off DVR anyway), but I don’t think I could ever give up access to several games, or watching at home. Nobody watches CFB like me, so I rarely allow anyone over on Saturdays. Too distracting for the normal person to be around during the intensity of gamedays.
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+1, Mac. It’s far too serious for friends. 🙂
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In case you’re interested, the PAC 12 Network has game replays condensed to 1 hour. You can record the game, fast forward through the commercials and watch the whole game in about 45 minutes. I’ve seen just about every major game played in the PAC 12 this season doing that. BTW, the best team in the PAC 12 isn’t Oregon, it’s Stanford. If the Cardinal hadn’t been ripped off by the refs in the ND-Stanford game then Stanford would be a 1 loss team and in the hunt for a BCSNCG berth. UCLA is right up there, too.
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CBS has the SEC Express show which condenses games to one hour as well. Interesting comment on Stanford, I don’t see that but my vision is blinded by them losing to ND, questionable call or not. They did play a great game last Saturday against Oregon, and in a very tough environment. UCLA is still a puzzle to me as they have been hot and cold. Mora has done an impressive job in his first year.
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Do you need advice on how to place you bets? I can help for a small fee.
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“If I were a policy maker in government, I would be taking a hard look at this right now,” he said. “I don’t think these conferences should be telling our great universities how to handle their governance matters.”
Wait, WHAT? WHAT??? This is what has been going ever since the BCS began. It’s pretty much why the BCS was formed at all–to relieve the NCAA of exactly those duties. Now we’re bothered that the BCS horse is, as the Senator says, far, far out of the barn– and is executing its powers exactly how it sees fit with absolutely nothing to slow it down?
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Dana O’Neil has a nice response on ESPN about the greedy bastards involved in all this mess.
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Now there’s talk of those western schools that left the MWC for the Big East actually returning to the MWC. Stop the madness!!!!! Where and when does this crap end???
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Thought this site was about Georgia. And about National Championships. Not crybaby wannabees bitching about playoffs ten years from now. Fuck the BCS and the NCAA and whatever it becomes. Go you Georgia Bulldogs, Sic ’em.
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What about mocking Georgia Tech? 😉
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