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Thursday, May 15, 2008
Why can’t ACC play championship in ATL?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Cleaning out the notebook after the end of the ACC meetings:
1. So why can’t the ACC championship game be in Atlanta? I got a lot of people asking this question the other day. The answer is that the ACC would dearly LOVE to play its championship football game in Atlanta. And the folks at the Atlanta Sports Council have pitched every kind of workable plan to them. But here’s the problem. The SEC controls the Dome, a lot of the World Congress Center and all of the surrounding property for its game and there is no way they are letting the ACC crash their party. That wouldn’t make business sense. So the ACC’s only option, if it wanted to play in Atlanta, would be to play its game on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. That can’t happen because three of the teams—Florida State, Georgia Tech, and Clemson—play their rivalry games on that Saturday. The ACC schools could move those games but the SEC requires its teams to play their last regular-season games on the Saturday after Thanksgiving.
The ACC can’t play on Monday night after championship Saturday because the BCS pairings come out on Sunday. So until the SEC pulls out of Atlanta—and that’s not going to happen—the ACC will continue to look for a location that works.
2. Tampa to lower ticket prices: The ACC championship game had mixed results in its first three years in Jacksonville. The first game between Florida State and Virginia Tech in 2005 drew 72,749. The second game between Georgia Tech and Wake Forest drew a crowd that was generously estimated at 62,850. Last year’s game between Boston College and Virginia Tech drew 53,212. So the ACC is going to give Tampa the game for the next two seasons followed by Charlotte in 2010 and 2011. The first thing Tampa got the opportunity to do is cut ticket prices. An upper deck seat to this season’s championship game on Dec. 6 will be only $25. For non-students, the cheapest seat to the three games in Jacksonville was $70. Tampa’s Raymond James Stadium seats 65,857. The ACC will also be more involved in marketing the game. The league has decided that it will be willing to make a little less money in order to get the game to a sellout or near a sellout. That’s a smart decision.
3. The nine-game conference schedule will come up again: The coaches shot down the idea and this time the athletics director went along. But in two years the ACC will have to renegotiate its television packages and, like all conferences, it will be looking for a raise. The TV boys have told all the conferences that if they want more money they need a better inventory of games over the entire schedule. The coaches will remain adamantly against it but next time around it may not matter.
“We were against adding a 12th regular season game and you see how that turned out,” one coach said to me.
4. NCAA puts bowls on notice: The NCAA sent out an interesting letter to all the bowls last week. The letter essentially said that while the NCAA has certified 34 bowls for next season, that certification does not guarantee that a team will be available for any bowl. It is a pre-emptive move by the NCAA to ward off litigation in case there aren’t enough teams with at least six wins to fill the bowls. Some of the bowl execs I talked to want to know: “If you were worried about having enough teams, why did you certify two more bowls?”
This could get nasty. Right now a bowl cannot take a team unless it has a 6-6 record or better. This December a bowl could be in a situation where it has to petition the NCAA for a waiver to take a 5-7 team. If that happens the NCAA will get hammered in the court of public opinion. And it should.
5. Bye-bye Boise! What about San Fran? The ACC’s relationship with the Humanitarian Bowl in Boise was essentially over in 2005 when a luncheon held for both teams basically turned into a Boise State pep rally. Boston College didn’t need any more motivation to beat Boise State 27-21 in a game that was not that close. The coaches said it made no sense to take an ACC team that far from home to play a WAC team in a WAC stadium. And they were right.
So the No. 8 team from the ACC will play in either Mobile, Ala. (GMAC) or Washington, D.C. (Congressional) starting in 2009. So what about the Emerald Bowl in San Francisco, which gets the No. 7 ACC team? Now that the Congressional Bowl is on line, it’s time to quit sending a 7-5 or 6-6 team to the West Coast. Lock that team into D.C. and give the fans and the parents of the players a chance to drive and see it.
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