Just picked up this article from a Herd board. An interesting read - an interesting perspective. Don't know if all the writer's facts are correct, but it does provide some interesting insight in the the "Market-size myth."
<a href='http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/sports/5898191.htm' target='_blank'>from Newport News VA</a>
I've always laughed at the idea that Syracuse brings New York City. That's just not the case. NYC is its own world. The king of the hill down there when it comes to college programs is St. John's. Army football gets some respect, too. But that's about it.
That said, Syracuse pretty much owns upstate. Put together Albany, Utica, Syracuse, Rochester and, to a lesser extent, Buffalo, and one is talking about a lot of television sets.
(One could throw in Binghamton, Elmira, and Watertown, I suppose, but now we are talking about tiny markets).
<!--EDIT|RochesterFalcon|May 19 2003, 09:43 PM-->
This one links out of the previous one:
<a href='http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/sports/5898538.htm' target='_blank'>Big East Commish Scolds Miami</a>
I think his bombast is laughable: we'll see what a hypocrite he is when the dominoes start to fall and the BE is raiding conferences.
It seems to me that this whole scolding of Miami by the BigEast commish is a public admission that any attempt to keep Miami has already failed. At this point, he has nothing to lose. If he still had a chance to keep Miami, this tirade would end that anyway.
He just dragged Miami's name through the mud - so why would Miami want to go back to a conference that questioned its right to self-determination and called the Miami-ACC talk "wrong" etc? Miami was part of those talks - this was not a blind sided invitation to Miami. Miami was the one that requested Syracuse and BC as a condition of accepting an ACC invitation - not the ACC. That, as much as anything, threatens the continued survival of the BigEast FB conference.
Georgia Tech was added to the ACC in the early 80's over Virginia Tech. Same reasons we're seeing today- They wanted to add the Atlanta market.
I never liked the addition of Fla. State. It made for an odd-sized 9 team conference, really spread the conference out geographically, but gee whiz, we open up the ACC to Florida and have instant conference football credibility. More attractive conference for television. In hindsite, it's surprising the ACC didn't make a play for more schools years ago to increase it to a 12 team conference. The ACC always played 2nd fiddle to the SEC in football, and a few more football schools (e.g. Penn State & Miami) would have made it into the conference they apparently want to become. Miami already had a rivalry with FSU, Maryland played Penn State regularly back then.
Wake Forest should be thankful that it was already in the conference (except on the days its football team plays FSU). Can you imagine the laughter at a small private school in Winston-Salam, N.C. applying for ACC membership in 2003.