They were never even competitive in basketball in the Big East - they were a perennial jobber program for Georgetown, Syracuse, and UConn to beat. BC is only in the ACC now because people in 2003 thought legacy cable television subscriptions and carriage fees would be a thing forever. In the 03 expansion, the ACC was just reusing the Big East's basketball expansion playbook, which at that point was almost 30 years old, and only applicable to BASKETBALL. The best basketball recruits at that time all came from major metropolitan areas in the northeastern United States. The Big East's entire business model from the late 70's through the early 2000's was to get a basketball program in or around every major city in the NE US and make sure they were always on TV, so they could get the best players in the country committed to programs in the conference. They only veered from that model to add WVU, VT, etc. because they had to appease the schools with football agendas. That playbook is not applicable on a 1-1 basis to the ACC's business model at the time, which was, "we have what are historically the best, most tradition-rich basketball programs in the country, and that's why recruits want to play in the ACC." ACC football, at the conference level, has pretty much always been a joke. The entire focus of the 03-04 expansion should have been "make ACC football better." The addition of VT and Miami in that regard made sense. Even the addition of Syracuse at that time would have made a tiny bit of sense, as Syracuse football, while clearly on a downslope, was way less of a joke then in the twilight of Donovan McNabb's time there. The addition of BC made zero sense. BC's addition to the ACC in 04 had everything to do with them being located right outside Boston, and very little, if anything to do with their football program being competitive. They were forced to add VT instead of Syracuse in 03-04 because they did not then understand the concept of people wanting to watch good football on TV - all they understood was BIG CITY = PEOPLE AUTOMATICALLY WATCH THE GAMES, which, as we all now know, has been the exact opposite case for football. College football programs located in major cities with pro teams have the absolute toughest framework in which to operate.