You have all seen the Duke/UNC basketball game cancelled due to the snow. Now imagine you had to get to Roanoke and then take a back road to Blacksburg or taking a two lane road to Pulaski and then another two lane to Blacksburg. Winter weather is one of the reason the ACC schools left VT in the So-Con back in 1953.

Yes, Maryland, Duke, Clemson and SC were extremely pissed that VT's president was supporting a a post season bowl ban on academic grounds, and when UNC made the motion to bring VT into the ACC with the other four, the motion would have passed 4-3 had UVa not been invited first to rejoin (they left in 1936) and they did not want competition with VT. As it was the motion died 4-4 with Duke relenting. Wake, UNC, NC State and Duke voted for VT. While the bowl ban gets the lions share of the press, the difficultly in getting to Blacksburg in the winter can not be understated. No matter which way you went, you had to go up and cross the Blue Ridge in the days before the current weather forecasts, four lane roads and busses with modern breaks.

Maryland had always opposed West Va with a passion and UVa did not want to play WVa and their spatial isolation in the 1950's also worked heavily against them. UNC's motion to admit them died for lack of a second.

Since VT had been a member of the group since 1907, they had good reason to feel blackballed and it explains their 50 year battle to rejoin their peers. West Va had only been in the SoCon since 1950 and it was the small schools that voted them in against the wishes of Maryland and this is the source of the 60 year axe to grind against the ACC. It's ironic though that the school that cut their throat is now finally leaving the ACC for the frozen tundra of the B10.

Can you shed some more light on the UMD/WVU matter? They seemed to have had a continuing series, so I am surprised UMD would oppose them.

Clemson was so pissed at Virginia Tech that they played them in 1954 and 17 times total between leaving them behind in the SoCon and VT joining the ACC.


North Carolina was so supportive of the merits of Virginia Tech that they played them once between 1953 and 2004 and that was in a bowl.

(02-13-2014 03:40 PM)esayem Wrote:  Can you shed some more light on the UMD/WVU matter? They seemed to have had a continuing series, so I am surprised UMD would oppose them.

The bad blood between West Va and MD is rooted in the 30's, 40's 50's. MD did not want them in the SOCon but the VMI's, VT's, William and Mary's and George Washington's voted them in along with UNC, NC State, etc.

It's about Maryland's pan handle. It's also about academics since WVa does not have competitive undergraduate admissions.

Now UNC and NC State don't fully respect ECU academics but we have played them. As Maryland football began to decline after Bobby Ross, playing WVa guaranteed a sell out in College Park. There are teams you will play for recruiting and money purposes but that you will not allow to join the club. Maryland looks down it nose at WVa,, the same way UVa does.

WVa also encroaches too close to UM for UM's comfort. Remember, UM also opposed adding Penn State in the 1980's and Florida in the 1970's. UM wanted to control everything in the greater DC/Baltimore area.

UM looks at WVa, the same way UNC looks at ECU. It's that simple.

Oddly, UNC has always been somewhat sympathetic to WVa.

If West Va., could shut the mouths of some of the more vociferous fools (like the Dude). Stop buringi coachings and tossing bottles of urine at game, and create a feeder college system to allow West Va to begin to have competitive undergraduate admissions, they might be able to overcome the issues that have plagued them with the ACC, now that the lynchpin against them are gone.

Now, only Duke and UVa are AGAINST West Va from academic competition issues. The fence sitters and key votes against West Va. are you, Pitt, ND, State, and Wake. Any two of us can blackball them again.

I suspect that if Pitt is ready to allow them back, that NC State will go along with Pitt and that leaves it up to you, ND and WF. However there would have to be some rules on their behavior during games.

FSU, Miami, GT, Clemson, Louisville, Syracuse would support WVa.

But everything now is tied to structure. Going to just three or four rivals for football helps is we get that passed. Allowing a non-conference game against a P-5 rival helps.

If we can take care of Louisville (UK), GT(UGA), Clemson(SC), FSU(UF), Pitt(Penn State), WF (Vandy) and ND (Stanford), then the ACC can grow to 16/18/20/21 and we can accommodate West Va at some point.

However, we need to find a defacto rival for you, us, Duke, VT, UVa, Syracsue, Miami, and BC.

It seems to me that we should attempt to match Duke to Ole Miss or Northwestern. You should be playing Alabama or Michigan. We should be playing Auburn/LSU/Mississippi State/Purdue/Michigan State (cow colleges). VT should be playing Tennessee. UVa has establish a rapport with the west coast and a P12 set of teams should work. BC is tough to figure, but I think Baylor or TCU suites them.

You derive the following angles:

The cow college/land grant angle
The religious angle
The boarder states
The traditional powers

Now into this you could bring in a West Va and their natural ooc rival is "gasp" Maryland. State is also a natural rival of Maryland since 1907, but that's not going to happen until Debbie is long dead.

If I was the svengalli it would go like this:

FSU-Florida (Tradition)
Clemson-SC (Tradition)
GT-UGA (Tradition)
Louisville-Kentucky (Tradition)
WF-Vandy (Tradition)
VT-Tennessee (Boarder Rivalry)
UVa-California (Cross Country Rivalry)
NC State-Auburn or Michigan State (Land Grant)
UNC-Bama or Michigan (Mirror To The Land Grant)
Duke-Ole Miss (Interesting Juxtaposing History)
BC-Baylor (Catholics vs. Baptists)
Pitt-Penn State (Old Traditional Rivalry)
Miami-LSU or TAMU (Gulf Coast Powers)
Notre Dame-Stanford (Tradition)
Syracuse-Michigan State? (Cross Canada Rivalry)

If we expand:

West Virginia-Maryland (Boarder Rivalry)
Texas-OU (Tradition)
Navy-Army (Tradition)
Kansas-Mizzou (Tradition)
Cincinnati-Indiana/Ohio State/Purdue (Proximity)

Alas, one can dream.

I'm just glad to have a quarterback this year.

(02-13-2014 04:22 PM)Kaplony Wrote:  Clemson was so pissed at Virginia Tech that they played them in 1954 and 17 times total between leaving them behind in the SoCon and VT joining the ACC.


North Carolina was so supportive of the merits of Virginia Tech that they played them once between 1953 and 2004 and that was in a bowl.

You are ignoring the point Kaplony.

What went on in Greenboro in 1953 was well reported by Bill Brill and you can look it up. UNC's AD Carmichael (other reports say it was UNC President House) put forward the motion to allow VT to enter the ACC with the rest of us. WF seconded the motion. It failed 4-4. How many times you continued to play them in football is irrelevant.

UNC's motion to all West Va to follow the rest of us died for lack of a second.

Clemson voted for both blackballs because Clemson was mad at VT's President and against WVa because you did not want to travel there.

Here is a synopsis from WVa, but you need real Bill Brill's work to understand what really happened during the voting.

By John Antonik for WVUsports.com
August 22, 2011 11:47 AM







http://www.wvusports.com/page.cfm?story=19096&print=1

"Since it’s the first day of classes at WVU I thought it appropriate to have a little history lesson, so let’s step into our time machine and go back to 1953, the year West Virginia University almost got into the Atlantic Coast Conference.

First, a little background information is in order.

West Virginia joined the Southern Conference in 1950 to give the league an unwieldy 17 members spanning five states from South Carolina to West Virginia and including Washington, D.C. West Virginia athletic director Roy “Legs” Hawley turned his compass south when he couldn’t make any progress on an all-sports conference with some of the Eastern schools the Mountaineers were frequently facing in the late 1940s.

From the very beginning of WVU’s membership in the Southern Conference there were competing interests, the smaller and the bigger schools frequently at odds.

Then in the summer of 1951, the Southern Conference joined the Big Seven Conference and its top football program, Oklahoma, in banning members from participating in post-season bowl games as part of an on-going movement by a number of NCAA institutions wishing to de-emphasize college football.

Tulane and Vanderbilt spearheaded a de-emphasis program in the Southeastern Conference that didn’t get very far (it did not include the banning of bowl games), and new Big Ten member Michigan State was also in favor of banning bowl game appearances.

The decision by the Southern Conference to ban bowls was bitterly opposed by Maryland, then one of the top football programs in the country with Big Jim Tatum running the show in College Park, and Clemson, which frequently fielded bowl-caliber teams. Both Maryland and Clemson opted to play in bowl games that year anyway, the Terps defeating Tennessee in the Sugar Bowl to finish with a perfect 10-0 record, and Clemson losing to Miami in the Gator Bowl. As a result of those decisions, Clemson and Maryland were deemed ineligible to compete for the Southern Conference football title in 1952, thus setting in motion the eventual withdraw from the Southern Conference of those two schools, along with the Carolina schools, to form the Atlantic Coast Conference in the summer of 1953.

Seven months later, in early December, two months after the University of Virginia was invited to become the ACC’s eighth member, West Virginia and Virginia Tech were also under consideration for additional league expansion. From the time of the Southern Conference split, West Virginia and Virginia Tech had supporters who wanted them brought into the league along with Virginia as a package deal.

And West Virginia’s candidacy became even more appealing when the Mountaineers won eight regular season games and were invited to play Georgia Tech in the Sugar Bowl, adding to the school’s already sterling reputation for having a first-rate college basketball program (In 1953, the Southern Conference opted to remove its bowl ban, enabling West Virginia to accept the Sugar Bowl bid, although the Mountaineers had to forfeit 75 percent of their bowl proceeds to the league in order to go).

Virginia Tech was appealing as well because it was a charter member of the Southern Conference, was located near most of the schools in the ACC, boasted a solid academic reputation and its athletic program possessed a great deal of potential.

The ACC met on Friday, Dec. 4, 1953 in Greensboro, N.C., and during the meeting University of North Carolina Chancellor Robert House officially moved to admit West Virginia and Virginia Tech as the league’s ninth and 10th members. But ACC President James T. Penney of South Carolina ruled the motion out of order since the matter wasn’t officially on the agenda. Following a short closed session, the eight schools decided to table expansion for an indefinite period of time because West Virginia and Virginia Tech could not garner the necessary two-thirds votes to gain admittance. There was a four-four split in the voting, although the schools for and against were never publicly revealed. The reason for tabling the motion was obvious – support for membership wasn’t clear cut, both parties wanted to avoid the embarrassment of a public discussion when the Mountaineers were getting ready to play in the Sugar Bowl, and some ACC members believed further expansion would detract from the original goal of having the close, compact association it had developed at its outset.

In the same light, ACC vice-president F.W. Clounts of Wake Forest made it clear that the Deacons supported Virginia Tech’s membership but not West Virginia’s because of the great distance between Morgantown and the rest of the ACC (at that time there was no Interstate highway system and air service was just getting off the ground).

West Virginia and Maryland also didn’t see eye to eye on issues related to its football programs. Tatum wasn’t pleased with West Virginia’s support of the league’s bowl ban rule in 1951, and he also accused the Mountaineers of using some ineligible players during a game between the two schools early in his Maryland coaching tenure.

West Virginia’s failure to gain admittance into the Atlantic Coast Conference was one of athletic director “Legs” Hawley’s biggest disappointments. Just three months after seeing his alma mater denied admission into the ACC, Hawley died of a heart attack in March, 1954, at age of 53.

You could say Hawley died of a broken heart.

Even today, as West Virginia University continues to thrive as a proud member of the Big East Conference, there are still many old-time Mountaineer supporters who have always held the Atlantic Coast Conference in such high regard.

They remember how close West Virginia came to joining the ACC."

Kaplony, what's your point? Clemson voted to keep VT out of the ACC, your administration blackballed them over their Presidents support of the bowl ban. Just because you played them later doesn't change the fact that you voted against them.

My point is we weren't "pissed" at VT. As I have pointed out before we voted against VT because for all intents and purposes from the time the ACC broke away from the SoCon until the late 60's/early 70's VT was essentially no different than Furman and Bill & Mary. They played in a tiny stadium (Miles Stadium seated 17k. Clemson's first expansion of Memorial Stadium in 1958 added 18k seats to the 20k it already held.) and stuck with the Southern Conference for over two decades after the ACC split despite being an independent being a much more viable proposition back then. They sided with the small school faction in the SoCon because they were a small school compared to the majority of the schools that left to form the ACC. Clemson was also a small school (smaller at the time of the split than VT) but in athletic matters it went with the large schools because it had the foresight to see the importance of athletics. If we had been "pissed" at VT we wouldn't have played them, just like we didn't play Davidson, VMI, etc. after leaving the SoCon.

Lumberpack--

You mentioned Bill Brill---now there's a name that brings back sour memories for some of us older Hokies! Brill was sports editor for the Roanoke Times (or was it the World-News?) back in the 70's when I was in graduate school at Tech. In those days, Tech fans looked to the Roanoke papers as our "voice" in the heart of ACC country and hoped their sports columnists would champion our entrance into the ACC in the late '70s (GT got in instead).

Rather than be supportive of Tech, Brill seemed to go out of his way to knock VT and dismiss any chance we had of ever getting into the ACC. He was a Duke homer (I believe) and as soon as he retired from the Roanoke papers, he relocated to Durham where he could cheer for his beloved Blue Devils. When VT entered the ACC in 2004 Brill seemed quite upset and stated that we (Tech) would never win an ACC championship.

So my question is--did you know Bill Brill personally and do you know why he seemed to harbor so much hostility toward Virginia Tech? Brill couldn't have been a happy man---living so close to VT and so far from Duke for so many years!

(02-13-2014 04:43 PM)lumberpack4 Wrote:  ... GT ... would support WVa.

I cannot possibly disagree enough. We already have a rival who has no scruples, no academic floor, no academic restrictions, and fans that behave deplorably. We have no interest in doubling down on that.

(02-14-2014 02:04 PM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  

(02-13-2014 04:43 PM)lumberpack4 Wrote:  ... GT ... would support WVa.

I cannot possibly disagree enough. We already have a rival who has no scruples, no academic floor, no academic restrictions, and fans that behave deplorably. We have no interest in doubling down on that.

Same thoughts here too.

GT people - I did not realize you despised WVa so much. I made the assumption that football schools would acquiesce to them since FSU and Clemson want them, and if WVa did completed some changes regarding general admissions and decorum at games. You know what they say happens when one assumes. I've just always heard the WVa talk from VT, UVa, UNC, Duke, etc., never you. I don't hang around GT much anymore. Can you still get frog legs at the Varsity?

A West Virginia fan emptying his bowel in the GT band section at the 2007 Gator Bowl didn't help matters.

(02-14-2014 10:55 PM)WakeForestRanger Wrote:  A West Virginia fan emptying his bowel in the GT band section at the 2007 Gator Bowl didn't help matters.

They were not that poorly behaved when we beat them in the 2010 Champs Bowl. Maryland use to throw oranges with D batteries inside. Morgantown, College Park, and Philly (the Eagles) are the only three places I would not take my children for a game.

I think the main reason VT was blackballed originally was that we were in the middle of an 8 year period were we were deemphasizing athletics. It wouldn't have made sense to add VT. All other blackballing from 1954 to 2000, I blame on UVA not wanting competition.

Around 1995, UVA was about to drop VT from their schedules because that's what you do when you're the big dog and someone is catching up on you in a big way, but then VT went to back to back alliance bowls and 3 years later the National championship game and full membership in the BE and UVA couldn't avoid VT any more.

(02-17-2014 02:45 PM)ChrisLords Wrote:  I think the main reason VT was blackballed originally was that we were in the middle of an 8 year period were we were deemphasizing athletics. It wouldn't have made sense to add VT. All other blackballing from 1954 to 2000, I blame on UVA not wanting competition.

Around 1995, UVA was about to drop VT from their schedules because that's what you do when you're the big dog and someone is catching up on you in a big way, but then VT went to back to back alliance bowls and 3 years later the National championship game and full membership in the BE and UVA couldn't avoid VT any more.

No Chris - It was the bowl ban and probation that VT's President imposed on Clemson and Maryland that got you blackballed:

http://allstatesugarbowl.org/site414.php

Back then the Southern Conference presidency rotated around the schools and VT's president was in charge when Maryland decided they were going to the Sugar Bowl no matter how the Conference voted. The small schools and West Va voted to sanction Maryland and Clemson. That set the ACC pullout into motion. When UNC's representative tried to get you back into the group, Maryland, Clemson, and Duke were still mad and UVa having been admitted made 4. You needed six votes to get in the ACC in 1954.

(02-14-2014 06:20 PM)lumberpack4 Wrote:  GT people - I did not realize you despised WVa so much. I made the assumption that football schools would acquiesce to them since FSU and Clemson want them, and if WVa did completed some changes regarding general admissions and decorum at games.

I don't think Clemson and FSU necessarily want them either. Even as football schools. I have honestly never seen a school that has such a bad reputation among the academic community. Not sure if it is the fans, the academics, the leaders (and lack of confidentiality) or all of the above, but no one on the east coast seems to be a fan.