Tell Michael it was only business, it wasn't personal.
The ACC, its presidents and athletic directors did not intend to inflict any harm on you, Michael Tranghese, nor on the Big East Conference you lead. They were merely conducting some family business, fortifying their stake in the ever-competitive community that is the NCAA.
The business in question was hardly a government secret.
"This is going to be a very powerful football leaugue," said Carl Franks, the man at the helm of Duke's traditionally downtrodden but ever-improving football team.
Yes, of course it was all about football--or rather, the multimillion dollar business of football. There is money to be had in television contracts, a secured place in the Bowl Championship Series and the still-elusive conference championship game.
In fact, it was the championship game that instigated such a strong push for expansion from several of the ACC schools. Indeed, the ACC will get its conference championship in football at some point, the only question is when. With just 11 schools currently, the ACC has requested that the NCAA permit the conference to hold a title game with less than 12 teams, as the rule currently requires a dozen schools. And even though the ACC has a good chance of being granted permission to have a championship game with its 11 schools, the conference big-wigs already have a back-up plan--finding a twelfth school within the next two or three years.
But what of Duke's 24 other varsity sports, and the myriad high-quality programs from the rest of the ACC? Certainly, the 51-year old conference already has the best basketball, baseball, men's and women's soccer, men's and women's lacrosse and field hockey in America.
"I don't think it's a particularly good thing for the rest of [the ACC's] 25 sports," Duke athletic director Joe Alleva told me last week. "But for football it was a good decision, and this was a football decision."
Tranghese should recognize that the entire six-week debacle that resulted in Miami and Virginia Tech defecting to the ACC was a simple business maneuver more readily than anyone. In the early 1990's, Tranghese's time was occupied with solidifying and stabilizing his conference by expanding the Big East with football-playing universities. Back in September of 1990, Tranghese was putting the finishing touches on a deal that brought Miami to his then-nine member conference, a league which was struggling to hold onto its three football-playing constituents, Syracuse, Boston College and Pittsburgh.
"It solves a basketball problem for Miami, and a football problem for us," Tranghese told the Washington Post at the time. "If you don't have an alliance with football schools, you're going to be left out in the future.... The day is going to come when the super conferences will not want to share with the conferences that don't play football. If we lose [our football-playing schools], we're putting ourselves in a vulnerable position."
What Tranghese accomplished, then, was economically sound and necessary for the survival of his conference. He had matured as an athletic director at Providence--a founding father of the Big East in 1979--and was merely maintaing his allegiance to his Big East family when he lured Rutgers, Virginia Tech, West Virginia and Temple into his league in 1991. As such, the nascent Big East football conference was an immediate player on the national level. Why, then, has Tranghese been so surprised and revolted over the past six weeks? ACC commissioner John Swofford has said all along that his reasoning for wanting to expand his conference was simply to maintain the validity of the league (translation: to make sure the ACC had a seat at the next BCS realignment in a few years). Swofford's actions were, in fact, necessitated by the actions that Tranghese began when he created the Big East football conference. Those superconferences have become a reality (see the Big 12 and SEC), and the Big 10 recently upgraded to 11 with Penn State. So what's wrong with the ACC muscling its way into a secure future? Survival of the fittest, right?
"We handled that like a bunch of third-graders," North Carolina basketball coach Roy Williams told the New Jersey Star-Ledger.
That's not exactly true.
A scrutinization of the events leading up to the expansion debacle indicates that, in fact, the ACC was handling the proposed expansion process professional and secretively--that is, until Tranghese bleated to the media in early May that his conference was being raided and plundered by the big, bad ACC. "Each school made to see that all nine [universities] were represented on the committee, called the Long Range Planning Committee," Alleva explained to me in his office last week. "We'd been studying expansion for probably 18-20 months, and we had done a really good job of keeping it quiet. And it all exploded when Mike Tranghese caught wind of it and of course came out in the paper blasting pretty much the ACC for what we were doing. But it was a good process up to that point. We did a lot of research, a lot of investigation, we hired a consultant group to do some more research into television markets and possible revenue sources and to study expenses and the whole gamit of what you need to do before you add any schools."
"When the Big East found out about it, I think it created a situation where it put us on a faster track than what we were on," Alleva continued. "We were on a pretty slow, deliberate track.... One of the problems of being on a faster track is that it's really difficult to get nine, 18, or 27 people together--there are nine athletic directors, nine presidents, and there are nine faculty representatives.... Just to get the presidents together is really difficult. So we got stuck in a mode of having conference calls, and conference calls are really difficult to get things done. It's so much better to get things done face-to-face across a table when you've got everybody interacting, and I think that really hurt the process."
But the problems went deeper than that, Duke President Nan Keohane explained to me in an e-mail.
"The process was unsatisfactory on many counts.... Conference calls among people who know each other well, as we do, are not a bad thing in themselves. But they need to be carefully organized, with a clear agenda set in advance, a definite sense of what will be accomplished at each meeting, and good notes or records kept for all to see and keep. None of these things was true; on each conference call, we more or less started 'flying blind,' with a vague agenda and no sense of whether we would reach a decision or not; and notes were never shared so when people had different recollections (which we certainly did) about crucial meetings...people later criticized each other for failing to act in ways that were consonant with what the accuser remembered about the meeting, but not the way the person accused recalled it."
"This caused us a lot of trouble at many points, but for whatever reason the ACC office didn't see fit to organize the meetings more clearly. Instead, more and more of the calls were set up and each continued until people were had to catch planes or make crucial appointments or were exhausted, with no clear outcome. If it had not been for the June 30 date for leaving the Big East without penalty, we'd still probably be having those twice weekly conference calls, except we'd have all gone crazy first!"
To make matters worse, during the 18-month research period, Alleva explained that the effect on basketball and divisional alignment were effectively ignored, much to his chagrin.
"Basketball scheduling was not studied that much," Alleva said. "The impact on basketball was not talked about that much, and was another one of my big concerns. I always wanted to talk about how we were going to be aligned afer expansion. I thought that was very important: who we were going to play, how it was going to look.... Folks said, 'Well let's just wait until we expand, and afer we expand, then we'll decide how we're going to break things up.'"
Throughout the process, the majority of the ACC--N.C. State, Florida State, Georgia Tech, Wake Forest, Clemson and Maryland--was going crazy because Duke and North Carolina refused to vote in favor of an expansion any greater than 10 teams, and Virginia was adamant that it could not support expansion unless fellow intrastate institution Virginia Tech was included (though Virginia was originally in favor of expansion, state governor Mark Warner made the Cavaliers an offer they couldn't refuse...whether or not a dead horse or Luca Brassi was involved is yet unknown).
Duke and North Carolina, then, were put in the unique situation of being in the minority, as they held all along that several concerns were yet to be addressed by the conference officials.
In addition to issues regarding student-athlete welfare, extensive time away from class and travel costs, Alleva said he "was not convinced that financially it was going to be a windfall for [Duke or the ACC]. I was an am very concerned about basketball scheduling and losing the intimacy of the ACC, losing the double round-robin we have right now."
Keohane told me there was indeed much pressure from her colleagues in the ACC to fall in line and support expansion, a fact that most likely intensified simultaneously with the increasing media pressure and criticism. "Each of us who opposed expansion, whether as a general idea or in terms of specific scenarios, came under some pressure to 'get with the program' at some point in the process by those who were clearly in favor of expanstion to 12 teams, but it was never disrespectful or mean-spirited," Keohane wrote. Of course, Duke and North Carolina were right to stand by their convictions--which, in my opinion, were well thought out and accurate--as many of their concerns are still unresolved.
However, a meeting has been set for the end of September at Virginia's campus, where the ACC presidents--including leaders from Miami and Virginia Tech--will come together to discuss football scheduling for the 2004-2005 season.
So regardless of the tremors that have been felt in the ACC since May--and of the aftershocks, which are already forcing the Big East and Conference USA to consider their expansion options--Duke is optimstic heading into the 11-team ACC.
"We're committed to making it work even though we were against it, we are committed to making it work becuase our futre is tied into, now 10, other schools. And we have to work together as a family and make it work, and we will. I don't know how many brothers or sisters you have...but I'm sure you'll have arguments in your family, well that's what we had, some disagreement in the ACC, but you know what? It's over. And now we're all on the same team, and we're all going ahead and we'll make the best of it to make it work.
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