weekend review, sort of

A few topics of discussion before I hit up my summer sabbatical.....

-- Syracuse.  Will officially be an ACC member on July 1 next year.  It's really weird that they and Pitt didn't, like, coordinate their efforts and carpool over; Pitt still has this lawsuit going on and Cuse managed to just negotiate their way out.  Still, here's betting it'll be announced within a month or two that Pitt has also reached an "amicable" agreement for departure and ACC membership on July 1.  And the Biggish Eastish will once again announce they've never been more excited about the future of the conference despite the fact we basically just burned their house down.

Seriously, it's actually pretty impressive that the ACC managed to, piece by piece, force an effective merger of the two conferences under the ACC banner.  It's like if an airline basically merged with another by buying all its planes and hiring all its workers and the pillaged airline replaced all the planes with Spruce Goose replicas and then declared how excited they were about their future.  Right.

Anyway, with this news, there are lots of interesting things left to be worked out by the ACC.  They've made (publicly) exactly two of those decisions: how to split the divisions, and how to set up the basketball schedule.  They haven't announced how the nine-game football schedule will rotate.  They also need to figure out things like:

- how to set up the lacrosse tournament.  Likely: seeds 4 and 5 play in.

- how to set up the baseball schedule.  An odd number of teams will make it interesting, as Syracuse has no baseball team.  And are they going to keep these stupid divisions?

- what the logo will look like.  OK, that's probably not that hard, they'll just add two more stars on the map.  What I'm actually interested in is what they'll do if they can convince Notre Dame to join.  It wouldn't fit on the map and is probably somewhere on the L in Atlantic.

- how to set up the basketball tournament.  The easy way is to take away the byes for all but the 1 and 2 seeds.  It doesn't preclude them from getting creative.

So it should be an interesting year; the last in a 12-team ACC.

-- Hokies.  Good Lord.  A lot of this stuff I'm about to reference got deleted from Hokie message boards because some of them got to realizing what nincompoops they looked like on all this.  It started, more or less, with some Hokies getting it into their heads that a certain football camp in Tidewater was "steering" its players to UVA over Tech.  There being nothing really wrong with that even if true, and VT having certainly been the beneficiary of "steering" in the past, nefarious claims of street agents and a shadowy "Godfather" were tacked on so as to make this thing worthy of the NCAA hammer.  Calls to investigate went out.  Wouldn't you believe it, someone did.  The looney-bird Hokies were not happy with the results, but they started to sound like the conspiracy-addled moonbats who think the Apollo missions took place on a soundstage.  "You didn't ask the hard questions!"  "I did.  The answer was no."  "Then you didn't ask them hard enough!"

And then we get to the part that makes you do a spit-take once you actually pay attention to the words.  Hokie logic says:

"Andy..Most of the players that participate with them guys all transfer to other schools once they get with them.[ed. meaning high schools; that is, players supposedly go to this camp and are encouraged to switch high schools] This is worst then the Penn State Scandal. A cover up!"

Stunning lack of perspective has been achieved.

With Hokie fans attacking the credibility of the coaches in the 757 area, it's already coming to pass that the players are taking notice.  Again from that article's comment section, the money quote:

Im a athlete for sports academy and yall sound rediculous these coachs have coached us since kids.. Wolfpack all dat we are a family from all schools all they want is to see us benefit somewhere safe and we can call home.. Never has coach lele or lex or dave ever asked any of us for anything but our time and effort.. They spend their time and money to. See us benefit some of us cant afford to go to. Vtech or uva every week but we as a brotherhood look out for eachother as brothers.. We are all over the 757 all of the best athletes.. All we want is to be football players why do our coachs get blamed for helping us called cheaters.. Its not vtech time any more the program at uva is changing no reason why vtech is mad they shud be uva is honest.. With there players uva is grimey they took away nthony cooper and kyle dockins and others offers and blasted them on the internet saying they never got it.. Call it what u want but its us that decide not to go to vt not out coachs vt is not for us

Cutting through the typos and text-message-style writing common to high schoolers** you get a few insights.  As in, it's not just UVA fans cracking jokes about Tech pulling their offer when it looks like a kid is going to UVA instead.  The players are seeing that stuff.  "VT is not for us" should have been a wake-up call to any Hokie reading it; instead, yet another maroon-sporting numbnuts thought it would be a bright idea to respond to that post with more trash talk.  Hilarious.

**The really important passage from the player's post is probably also the most confusing; it should read like this: "UVA is honest with their players.  VT is grimy, they took away Anthony Cooper's and Kyle Dockins's and others' offers and blasted them on the Internet saying they never got it."

-- Some interesting offseason basketball stuff, from the people who call themselves experts.  ESPN offered a best-case-worst-case analysis of the ACC, and what they say should be, believe it or not, heartening.  Because for UVA, there isn't much difference between best and worst.  Best: "back in the NCAA tournament."  Worst: "on the bubble in the first two weeks of March."  So, like, with a chance to make the tournament anyway.  And Jay Bias (uh, Bilas) has UVA 5th in the ACC in the offseason power rankings, for what that's worth.  I think it's worth something, as UVA tends to be either underrated or ignored by ESPN.  "Underrated" is one thing, but "ignored" tends to have a bad effect on recruiting.  Not being either brings attention, which means publicity, which tends to have a way of building on itself.

-- Reminder that today is the last post until next Monday.  It's too friggin' hot to post, anyway.  If I wanted my thermometer to nudge past 100 I'd move to the desert.  I'm never moving to the desert.