As I type this on Sunday morning, ACC athletic directors are descending on Amelia Island, Florida, preparing to debate a proposal that has enormous implications for college athletics in general and Virginia Tech in particular. The prospect of ACC expansion has created one of the more trying times for Virginia Tech and its fans. It has produced wild mood swings as competing reports vie for our attention. Message board posts claiming inside information from sources, either real or imagined, have induced euphoria or depression.

I can relate to those who claim to or have inside knowledge. Over the years, things I have written have enabled me to strike up Internet relationships with people far closer to the inside workings of college athletics than I, individuals who for whatever reasons have found me to be interesting, slightly or otherwise. The result is that I am told certain things, perhaps true, perhaps not, and leading to the interesting recent phenomena of receiving e-mail from two so-called sources, each containing information that was directly contradictory to the other. Go figure.

What is fact is that if I were ever to name one on the Internet I will have received my last e-mail from them, so I don�t. I suspect the same is the case with other people. When scanning a message board I tend to put the most credence in posts from friends, including old or new ones I might have made at the Spring Game, and those posters whose message board history has demonstrated their reliability and reason. Basically, we have been left to our own devices to believe what we want to believe, make our own observations and form our own opinions, and I have this forum to deliver mine.

Quite interesting was the recent published statement by North Carolina Chancellor James Moeser informing everyone that Miami had been negotiating with the ACC for the past seventeen months, information that must have come as a shock to President Hardesty of West Virginia, who had been assured by University of Miami president Donna Shalala as recently as five months ago -- before signing off on an expensive luxury box construction at Mountaineer Field -- that the Canes were going to hang around.

It also was a surprise to the Big East, as was the report, no doubt leaked to the media by the image-conscious ACC Public Relations Department, that the Canes had approached John Swofford and presented themselves along with Syracuse and Boston College as an all-or-nothing package deal.

Other reports seeping out of South Florida and Greensboro have since claimed that Miami's president promised Swofford she would come if invited and he vowed to round up the seven votes. Swofford naturally desired to conduct his wheedling and cajoling of ACC ADs in secret and out of the media glare, a strategy that blew up in his face when Big East Commissioner Mike Tranghese got wind of the scheme and promptly blew the whistle to Dick Weiss of the New York Daily News.

This in turn kicked off a firestorm. Suddenly all ACC members, who love to give the impression for public consumption of collegiate good fellowship, were squirming in the publicity of constant questions about votes, discussions and general attitudes, revealing that this is a conference with deep schisms in attitudes among its membership. It also caused no small amount of consternation among Big East members not on Shalala�s A-List of the Chosen Ones. For her part, Shalala has to have been a bit taken aback to learn that we simple mountain folk at Virginia Tech were not willing to meekly accept the athletic oblivion she and Swofford planned for us, but have instead elected to put a fight, a pretty good one, it would seem.

Virginia Tech was moved to action. While VT president Dr. Charles Steger must have received a jolt to discover that Shalala had been telling him one thing and John Swofford another, he quickly recovered and displayed that Tech had been planning for this eventuality for some time, unleashing a series of maneuvers, ranging from using relationships with current ACC members to strongly make Tech�s case for inclusion in the event of expansion, to utilizing political pressure on the Hoos to either get Tech in or veto the whole thing. While it remains to be seen whether Tech will be successful, it has to be said that Dr. Steger and Jim Weaver, the VT Athletic Director, played the poor hand they were dealt very well indeed. Tech had cards to play and played them, and were not reduced to standing by helplessly watching, as have been fellow BE football surplus [at least in the eyes of Shalala and Swofford] WVU, Rutgers and UConn, who can only hope that Dr. Steger can stop expansion, not merely have Tech substituted for BC or Syracuse.

There must be mixed emotions on the part of the pawns in this great game, Syracuse and Boston College. Chosen by Shalala and Swofford for the dubious value of their television markets that even ABC seems to be acknowledging as fraudulent, a desire by Shalala to preserve some of the northeastern character of her school�s student base, and because you have to have twelve, they will go from a status as major players in the Big East to peripheral outcasts in the New and Improved ACC.

Jake Crouthamel, AD of Syracuse, has to approach this with trepidation. He was one of the founders of the Big East and has devoted much time and effort over the years to the league�s maintenance and survival. From a competitive standpoint, the casual attitude of the fans of the Orangepersons towards bowl games and the large numbers of teams to his south with solid traveling bases means bowl trips will be a very rare occurrence. Jim Boeheim has just won a national championship and now must deal with the end of the storied rivalries that made the Big East famous and the awareness that if this goes through, the North Carolina basketball rivalries will be preserved in one division and he will find himself in the other dealing with scintillating games against Clemson and Florida State twice a year.

The season-ending tournament in Madison Square Garden that does seem to excite the Orangefans will be a distant memory, as you can bet the Tobacco Road gang ain�t gonna allow their basketball extravaganza to be played in New York too often. Give Maryland basketball coach Gary Williams a call and ask him how things have gone in Greensboro and Charlotte, Jim.

For their part, BC faces the Baylorization of their programs, doomed to a bleak future of competitive difficulties and constant long travel. Close regional rivalries will end [I wonder what BC�s baseball coach thinks of this?] and they will, for a long time, be a pariah in their region, as hard feelings from neighboring schools will die hard. Boston College, an excellent Catholic institution that prides itself on the positive values it teaches, has become sensitive to the words like �traitor� and �liar� that are being flung around New England.

AD Gene DeFilippo at BC is also dealing with the dawning realization that if push ever truly comes to shove, he will be the Yankee left high and dry by those Southern boys, bringing with it an awareness that perhaps Donna was not being altogether truthful with him, either. I have the feeling that if Syracuse and BC were given a vote on ACC expansion it would be No, but their athletic futures gives them little choice but to tag along on John and Donna�s Excellent Adventure.

While John-Boy desires Atlantic coast athletics hegemony, his mark on the league and a seat at the adult table when the BCS gets together, Donna is looking to ease the financial sting in case Coker ever again loses to Frank, as well as to hobnob in Greensboro with the varying shades of academic bluebloods, who don�t seem altogether pleased at the prospect, by the way, Tech is in a fight for its athletics life. John-Boy�s Tar Heel drawl of "It�s nothing personal, only business," rings pretty hollow in Blacksburg when the result is pretty darn personal to Tech.

For fifty years an underlying principle of Virginia Tech athletics has been our desire to compete in the ACC. It is where we belong, geographically, academically and although some schools are loathe to admit it, culturally. We have also proven what we can accomplish given a playing field that is even halfway level. Once again, however, we have discovered they don�t want us. So be it. Our continuation as a major football program and all that flows from that demands that we then try to stop any expansion. We have no other choice. This makes for the rather strange combination of bedfellows of us and the Hoos, Duke and North Carolina. It is hard to imagine many other circumstances that would make Dean Smith an ally of Virginia Tech. We are doing what we have to do.

UVa President John Casteen is in a difficult position, as he endures increasingly heavy-handed political pressure coming from Governor Warner and some very influential members of the General Assembly, as he weighs what would be a very good deal for the Hoos athletically, particularly if the division proposal of the Hoos grouped with Maryland and the North Carolina Big Four preserves their key basketball rivalries and gives algroh, who would subsequently dominate in-state recruiting, a good shot at least at the football championship game, and balances that against the close and cordial working relationship he has with Dr. Steger and the value of all of those joint ventures in NOVA and Roanoke, among others, would be worth when Tech�s inevitable athletics decline if excluded in an ACC expansion spreads to other parts of our university, as it will. There are serious issues at stake here that go far beyond whether we have simply thrown millions of dollars away on the SEZ.

What if we lose? Virginia Tech goes back to what those who us old enough to remember the '70s and '80s recall as a very difficult period of constantly and mostly futilely attempting to obtain recognition in the shadow of the ACC, and this time it would be a larger and even more dominant conference. Within a decade the SEZ would stand as a monument to Tech�s failed aspirations and a constant and irksome reminder of where we once were.

WVU would face the grim prospect of actually having to play games against Marshall, contests that would have about as much importance in the overall scheme of things as the Herd�s current clashes with Ohio. UConn would see its nascent I-A football program destroyed, and in Hartford, an entire brand-new $90 million stadium would serve as a backdrop for any future discussions of initiatives proposed by UConn, even academic ones, that involve large expenditures by that state�s taxpayers.

And if we survive to play another day? The failure of John Swofford�s power play would reveal him to be a weak and ineffectual commissioner who could not get his membership to go along with his agreements. It seems doubtful he would remain in office long. It would have been made perfectly clear to Florida State, again, that they are not considered a valued member of the ACC by a North Carolina league power structure that is mostly interested in having the Seminoles� football program pad their budgets while inflicting minimal damage on their cozy basketball arrangement.

Mike Tranghese watches these proceedings, glumly contemplating the reality that his days as a BCS conference commissioner are numbered; if there is ever a BABE, I can make a pretty good guess as to who would NOT be running it. Tranghese, perhaps the most reviled conference commissioner ever in collegiate athletics, does not deserve the verdict that history is likely to render upon him. His responsibility was to all fourteen Big East members, not just the football ones. He could not jettison the basketball schools due to league laws, and if caught in any attempt to do so, would probably have been opened up to personal legal liability.

Tranghese brought Notre Dame into the BE not out of any great desire to do the Irish any favors but out of BE football weakness, and in doing so preserved the Gator Bowl bid that we have come to know and enjoy. He attempted to find a common middle ground between the widely divergent agendas in his unwieldy league, a constantly shrinking piece of real estate that finally disappeared altogether.

If ACC expansion fails, there will be two leagues that face embittered factions, an ACC where Florida State and Georgia Tech have to be wondering about their futures within its confines, and a Big East where large numbers of the member schools do not trust each other, a state of affairs brought on by bitter personal experience. If Shalala is man enough to even show up at the Big East meetings, she will either have to answer questions concerning her repeated statements of "Miami is not leaving the Big East" with the response, "Define �is�" or attempt to ruffle feathers with conciliatory remarks along the lines of "Guys, it was all a joke. Let�s be buds."

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