The conclusions of the writer (if it's not AI?), not so much. it's a self serving post for PE and USF. Rice is rich, exclusive, academically outstanding, and has one of the smallest fan base in all of FBS. They are not "P conference" worthy IMHO unless some think these athletic conferences are academic clubs.

believe he has a clue.

Let’s stink it up.

football isn't the answer for the ACC. Even if USF is the only solid addition, there is probably no reason to add USF unless the ACC can add UCF too. Given how valuable FL is for recruiting, the ACC should always have at least 2 members from that state for scheduling purposes. Likewise, given CA's value in recruiting, if the ACC is going to add a third CA school in SoCal, then it really should add a fourth (i.e. Fresno State) so it can have 2 in NoCal and 2 in SoCal. I realize Fresno is technically more northern central CA, but for scheduling purposes it can easily be paired with San Diego State to ensure teams get to play at 1 team from NoCal and 1 team from SoCal every year. Even then I may still not pull the trigger to have more than 2 CA members.

The ACC has had it's time. It's past its expiration date. It could have survived, but it made comically wrong decisions at pretty much every single inflection point this century. Time to let it die, and start working on the 30 for 30.

be a more fitting end for the ACC.

Daughter wo works for Tech in the Fralin Life Sciences was part of an international conference held there last summer

This might be the dumbest thing I've ever read. This is a recipe for college sports content that nobody watches, and no media rights conglomerate in their right minds would pay anything more than peanuts for. If you think I'm being unfair, or not thinking it through, let's do a little thought experiment - When's the last time you watched an Ivy League sporting event? How much do you think the Ivy League's media rights are worth? EDIT: I had to go back and read it again, because I just could not believe how dumb it was, and I'm now fairly certain this was written by an AI chat bot, and published without going through an editing process. There's no way a human editor would have read this and thought anyone could take it seriously. What does having a campus in Switzerland have to do with creating compelling, high value college athletics content? 100% this was written by a chat bot, in response to a prompt like, "write a 5 minute read article about how the ACC will survive realignment and ultimately become more valuable than it is now." Can you imagine anyone in China giving a single, solitary **** about a Duke vs. Boston College football game in Shenzen? ** Edited by Baltimore_Hokie at 2/26/2026, 11:03:23 AM

No one knows what is going to happen, including me or you, but I do know that our Academic rankings are way more important than football. The Academic money/budget dwarfs the football money, even with the increase.

yes academic ranking is huge. HOwever, the BOV action directed the university to prioritize athletics the same as V advantage, Global Ranking, R&D, Expanding Borders efforts. NOW the messaging for VT is we expect national ranking in academics and its JUST as important that we achieve national rankings in athletics and the univeristy is committed to top funding.

with "academic money." Outside of certain institutions not wanting to be associated with others, academic rankings have zero to do with conference realignment. Case in point: Louisville is in the ACC. If the ACC had it to do all over, WVU would be too. The idea that anyone is going to care about a college athletics conference just because Rice and Tulane are in it, or that people are going to watch Wake Forest or Boston College games in Prague, are absolutely ludicrous.

association is real. Even Nebraska was in the AAU when they got into the B1G, you are pounding the table, but you don’t vote. The University Presidents vote, and your opinion though strong, doesn’t matter to them. By the way, mine doesn’t either but one exception for Louisville because Clemson and Florida State were threatening to leave for the B12 with Texas and Oklahoma at the time isn’t a precedent. In fact they completely reversed it for Stanford, Cal and SMU, even though FSU, Clemson and UNC voted against them, because they probably wanted to cut the GOR. PS I am not going to change your mind, and you are not going to change my mind either, so please, let’s agree to disagree on our “opinions” and not act like opinions are facts and move on. ** Edited by Stech at 2/27/2026, 8:21:55 AM

Have a great day! PS - as your posts so succinctly points out - Louisville was added for MONETARY reasons related to athletics and media rights, not academics. Stanford and Cal were also added for MONETARY reasons, not academic ones - They, along with the associational embarrassment that is SMU, were added in a panic so Wake Forest and Boston College could keep cashing checks from ESPN if FSU and Clemson left. When it comes to conference realignment, academics has absolutely Z-E-R-O to do with it. It's media rights money, full stop, bottom line, that's it. ** Edited by Baltimore_Hokie at 2/27/2026, 9:46:26 AM

ACC don’t care about their Academic Alliances in the Conference. Okay you keep living in that world if it makes you happy.

Nobody cares. Sands would join an athletic conference full of community colleges tomorrow if it paid VT 100 million per year for its athletics media rights.

you'd have a lot better handle on what's going on and why when it comes to conference realignment.

conference realignment, you've jumped the shark 🦈

find that the same exists for most of SEC. and BIG schools. PROBABLY FOR BIG 12

of a pump for VC or PE. It's the same guy who thinks that the B12 will get some capital, and that company is involved with USF.

Every conference has at least considered some funding from VC/PE. I'm not sure if the ACC is serious about VC, but my guess is JW heard something and wanted to combine that information with his favorite scenario (USF joining the ACC). That’s a tall task, and maybe he used AI for that writing.

Looks like a nice setting there as well

The entire "campus" is below:

never looked like that when I attended.

BC, or wake (some others as well), would you have a different opinion? I have been here long enough to not include VT, but the rest of the ACC? If you are CAL, or some of the really good academic schools like Rice or Tulane, you are almost begging for a conference like that. The Mag 7 was a good concept when it materialized, but the reality of the ACC contract gets in the way. As an outsider, and an avid old Big East fan, there are REALLY good universities, with not so good athletics, that deserve a place to land - and continue to be at the table. Am I wrong?

join that conference where basketball is still king (and queen). As for Duke's football program, it can find a home for it in any other FBS/FCS conference or discontinue the program since Duke doesn't seem interested in trying to increase interest to expand the capacity of Wallace Wade Stadium beyond 40,004. The same goes for BC, Syracuse, Wake, and Pitt in terms of joining/rejoining the Big East.

I understand that Lane is still considered in the top tier in capacity and attendance, that in and of itself isn't the entire story. BTW, Lane continues to be top 10 of my bucket list stadiums to experience .... but - KU recently paid around $300M to reduce their capacity from 47,000+ to 41,000+, and are not only projected to increase revenue, they are - by a LOT. Baylor, who not so long ago actually won a National Championship in basketball, just spent over $200M to build a new basketball arena that has a capacity of - hold your hat - 7500. Why the hell would they do that????????????????? They easily could get better attendance figures, but they went for the money instead. Tell you what, if you are a donor, love football, and want to be a part of the Lane experience, you are going to want just that - the experience. If you are giving $1000's of dollars, or what ever it takes to get decent seats, you do not want to be in a muddy field eating cold sandwiches to sit in a bleacher kind of seat. Fun when you are young, but when your kids have their own families, and you want to enjoy what you have been involved with your entire lives, you expect more from your donations. I'm telling you, there are a LOT of VT faithful willing to pay for it. Before media money, NIL, and players getting paid, stadium size REALLY mattered. Even Penn State is looking to drop their capacity up to 20,000 depending on who you read, to give the donor class the amenities they want, and rightfully, deserve. Duke has some pretty high up donors. In this new age, I wouldn't discount some of those privates from being extremely competitive in football.

There are local high schools with more juice than Wallace Wade stadium. It's a big concrete toilet. If it's not the absolute worst in the entire FBS, it's got to be bottom 5, easily.

others can find the money to upgrade their stadium, Duke can as well. I didn't even mention the multiple P4 stadiums getting upgrades. I have been to a Duke game, and you are right. In addition to it being a "concrete toilette", the game day atmosphere resembles a top MAC game rather than a top FBS game. My point is that capacity isn't the future anymore, is will come down to amenities for the donor class.

and it ain't football. They could bring WWS capacity down to 10k, and I don't think they would sell it out, much less pack a bunch of luxury suites. 90+% of Duke alumni were children of the mega-rich from the Northeastern Seaboard that couldn't get into an Ivy, and Duke Football just isn't considered a posh thing to be seen supporting in Greenwich, Connecticut.

base to that of KU's. KU had a similar football stadium that was on of the worst of P4 football. They also have a fan base that is 90% tied to basketball. The only advantage that KU has over Duke is the # of alumni. KU also recognized that when they were vetted by the Big 10, and didn't get an invite, that either they had to step up their game, or they too would be relegated to a "G" conference. Duke, like KU, has the money if the donors decide that in order to win basketball championships, they need to buy a football program, they will do just that.

when it comes to athletics. It's easy to look at Duke and KU, or Duke and Kentucky, and think they're similar places. But, the culture at Duke and those places couldn't be more different. Here's an analogy - KU and Kentucky are akin to really nice public high schools in great neighborhoods; Duke is more akin to a $120k a year private boarding school where Saudi princes send their kids. Duke does not care, at all, about football. If the ACC suffers a catastrophic fracture (let's call "catastrophic fracture" any scenario where UNC leaves the conference) - then I'm telling you exactly what will happen now - Duke will switch all its sports to the Big East conference and either go independent in football (more likely) or join the American or another G5 as football-only (long shot). I don't think they'd ever drop down to FCS for football, but I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility. Football just does not matter there, at all. It's all basketball there, all the time. The only other sports that get any juice there at all are those that only rich people from affluent locales can afford to get recruited in, like LAX.

stepmother is a Duke alumnus. I'm not just looking at the capacity of the stadium, but also the number of luxury suites, attendance history, and demand for tickets. When you compare the football program to the basketball program in those categories, then you should see that football comes in second place at Duke because Duke has built itself as being a basketball-first school. Think Villanova or Georgetown with a much larger football stadium. Those schools do have donors with large sums of money. However, those schools lack the large foundation within the fan base that you can see with a public school. If the ACC 2.0 is somehow relegated to G status because schools like VT find a new home, which may or may not be the Big XII, then will Duke be able to sustain any interest in its football program compared to its basketball program? Hence why I said the Big East would be the perfect home for those schools because those schools for most part could be considered basketball-first schools.

in football, with all their sports in the Patriot League, because that's their commensurate level of investment and competition. It's an absolute crime that they're allowed to continue cashing ACC checks. They're a worse zero-value leech than Wake Forest, and that's really, really tough to pull off. At least Wake Forest tries - they're still leeches, but at least they try. Duke, Cal, and Stanford would go independent before they aligned themselves with the conference described in that article. The people at Duke are already pissed about being associated with the plebian swill in the current makeup of the ACC.

don't know if they can come up with the money to compete with players getting paid, and NIL. It's a private Catholic school, and they got too far in front of their skies during the Flutie area. They have been competitive in the recent past, but I think that is because of the weakness of their competition, not their lack of investment. I believe BC can find the money, it's whether or not they really want too. They just do not have the media numbers in that neck of the woods, but looking at UMass, they just might become desperate enough to find the money.

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.

merger in 2003. This includes the non-D1-A football schools (Georgetown, Villanova, St. John's, Providence, and Seton Hall). Preserve so many great rivalries. Allow the old order ACC teams to have their own basketball division. Basketball divisions could have been broken up something like this for home and home: Old Order ACC Old Order Big East New Wave ACC/Big East: VT, WVU, FSU, Miami, Rutgers...add Louisville and Cincinnati perhaps. Have a massive tournament at MSG. I don't think Maryland would have left. And a Penn State coup would not have been out of the question back then. As to your question, I am not sure how the author's idea would make money and maintain athletic excellence for the members. Not saying it can't be done. I say I'd prefer the B12 just because of the teams involved. But I might need to give it more thought.

and striving for an "academic" conference based on international appeal smacks of desperation, not football.