(11-22-2020 01:22 PM)Hokie Mark Wrote:  

(11-22-2020 10:22 AM)Statefan Wrote:  https://indyweek.com/news/orange/unc-s-s...years-ago/

What follows is a Duke’s quasi-offical stance on what happened. It appeared in the Durham NC Independent in 2012 – Read it very carefully and you will see that two schools are not mentioned and it is as if they never existed. That’s purposeful.

As recounted by historian J. Samuel Walker in his fine book ACC Basketball, an academic study of the league's first 20 years, the seven schools that chose to defect from the Southern Conference and form a new league in 1953 were motivated by two distinct sets of concerns.
On the one hand, Clemson, South Carolina and Maryland, all of which were heavily invested in football...
Ironically, UNC and State College (as NCSU was then known) were two of the strongest proponents of the bowl ban: UNC President Gordon Gray (who controlled both schools' votes) described bowl games as "a non-educational distraction for students, both players and otherwise. ... [T]hey command much spectator interest but contribute little to the underlying values of intercollegiate athletics." Wake Forest President Harold Tribble chimed in, saying, "I am in favor of doing everything we can to restore intercollegiate athletics to the status of general student activities."
This attitude was a major problem for Maryland and its president, Curley Byrd, who had an aggressive strategy to use football success to catapult the university to national prominence. Flaunting the Southern Conference ban on postseason play, Maryland and Clemson chose to play in bowl games on January 1, 1952 (Sugar and Gator, respectively). The conference responded by placing both schools on probation.
That controversy led the football-minded schools to begin considering in earnest plans to break away from the Southern Conference... Meanwhile, the so-called Big Four schools (Carolina, State, Duke, Wake) were proceeding on a quite opposite track. At least at the level of institutional leadership, all four were said to favor strong academic standards and reining in the emerging commercialism of college sports...
But these schools were equally committed to staying in the game...
Those sentiments help explain why the reform-minded Big Four would choose to join forces with the football-oriented trio of Maryland, South Carolina and Clemson. Gray was willing to relent on the question of a conference-wide ban on bowl participation, but the new ACC did ban freshman eligibility and also established the requirement that players must "be enrolled in an academic program leading to a recognized degree, and should be making normal progress, both qualitatively and quantitatively, toward the degree."

I blame Clemson, S. Carolina and Maryland for knowingly inviting 4 schools which were opposed to football to join them in the formation of the ACC (when there were clearly some good football-first alternatives available). At most, they only should've invited 2 of them to keep the majority in their favor. I also blame VT for voting to ban bowls - a stupid vote which was apparently held against them for a long time.