Surprise! Closer Look Reveals ACC Not Superior to Big East This Bowl Season
D.A. | Jan 10, 2012 | Comments 3
SI.com
With the conclusion of the college football season last night, and the release of the final rankings today, it’s time to take a look at the future landscape. There are a lot of moving parts right now, particularly in conference realignment and Syracuse’s move to the ACC.
It’s been assumed the move was an upgrade in football conferences for the Orange, but a closer look reveals that surprisingly, the ACC wasn’t much, if any more successful than the Big East this season. In bowl games, SU’s current conference was significantly more successful than its future one. When the league’s champions met in the the Orange Bowl, West Virginia obliterated Clemson 70-33.
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For all the heat the Big East takes as a football conference, it accomplished two goals the ACC did not. It won a BCS game, and finished with a winning record overall. The Big East was 3-2, with wins from Rutgers, Cincinnati, and WVU. Those wins also came against the Big 12, SEC, and ACC respectively.
On the other side, the ACC had by far the worst bowl season of any major conference, going 2-6 and seeing its champion embarrassed in Miami. One of the ACC’s wins did come against the Big East, with N.C. State beating Louisville.
Even more interesting is to look at what the records of the post-realignment conferences would be. Shockingly, the margin grows even more in favor of the Big East when you factor in new additions Boise State, Houston, SMU, and San Diego State. Those squads went a combined 3-1, which would make the Big East’s record a very solid 5-3 (subtracting the West Virginia and Pitt results).
Bowl games alone aren’t the ultimate judge of a conference’s strength of course, but the final AP poll shows similar results. Here, the two conferences stack up pretty evenly, with the ACC placing three teams in the top 25 to the Big East’s two. The highest ranked team in either conference is West Virginia at #17, a few spots higher than top the top ACC team, #21 Virginia Tech. Here, once again the numbers swing even stronger towards post-realignment Big East when you factor in #8 Boise and #18 Houston.
The ACC still does hold a significant edge in recruiting, and has more big name programs with the Seminoles, Hurricanes, and Hokies, plus a rising Clemson team. But at least this season, these storied programs were outplayed by the overlooked Big East.
You would have to expect programs like Florida State can sustain more long term success than one like Houston. Going forward, especially with the recruiting edge, the ACC is still the better conference, and the more stable one for Syracuse to be a part of. But, in the short term, that “step up” in competition appears to be a much smaller one once you take a closer look.
Posted: Steve Neikam
Filed Under: ACC Realignment • Featured • Football
Espn threw out some loopsided # about the ACC overall rec. in BCS games. I think at most they have 1 or 2 wins overall in the bcs.
The ACC does do better at keeping a conference together and brokering tv deals, so it’s not even all about the quality of the football being played. I will not miss the terrible leadership of the Big East one bit. Too bad we can’t leave sooner.
The real shame of it all is that the Big East has always been superior to the ACC in Football. Hence, ACC stole Miami, VT and BC. Miami and VT have been the best football teams in the conference since joining with Florida St. somewhere close behind and Georgia Tech a good distance back. ACC took those teams and the Big East got better anyway with Louisville, Cincinati and UConn. TCU gets added too, although they left before even joining. The ACC now takes Pitt and SU and the Big East loads up with better teams as of right now with Boise State, Houston, SMU and San Diego State.
Same thing happens with coaches. Big East has/had great coaches and they get poached. Cincinati with D’antonio and Brian Kelly leaving for MSU and Notre Dame, WVU with RichRod leaving for Michigan (He got fired due to Grob!), UConn with Edsel leaving for Maryland, Louisville with Petrino leaving for Atlanta and then Arkansas.
There are only 2 reasons the Big East has failed:
1. ESPN and the rest of the corrupt media — How many stories have we seen about the Big East maybe losing its AQ status? The ACC has been worse pretty much every year in the criteria used to determine AQ status. The ACC has been worse in bowl record every year. The ACC has been worse in BCS bowl performance nearly every year.
2. Big East Leadership is ridiculously horrible — If conference leadership would have accepted ESPN’s $1.3 Billion deal last spring, SU, Pitt and WVU would still be in the conference. Pitt and SU both said that is why they left and if they were still there, WVU wouldn’t have been looking and lobbying to leave. That is just one issue Marinato whiffed on. He is responsible for the failure to stabilize the conference by now also. Had the Big East expanded with TCU earlier instead of being satisfied with replacing Miami, VT, and BC with just Louisville, Cincy, UConn and USF, the conference would have been more stable. Had the Big East expanded earlier further by offering and adding Boise State, SMU and Houston, the Big East would have had a conference championship game, a very high conference RPI rating and much more stability.