The end of an era...

My friends....today is a sad day. Only a portion of you will find it sad, but that does not diminish the sadness for the rest of us.

Today, the University of Miami and Virginia Tech officially became members of the ACC. Our once pure athletic conference, which was slightly tarnished with addition of Florida State, is now tainted something bad. And the worst part was that I think the ACC did it for the money. Historically, both schools have had average-at-best basketball teams, which is the ACC's bread and butter. However in football, Miami especially, they have excelled, and that in turn creates bowl bids, which brings in additional revenue for the conference and the conference schools.

The worst part of this whole sorry affair, is that basketball gets the shaft. Instead of playing home and home games with each team in the conference, you are only going to home and home with the teams in your division (for Maryland, this includes Duke, FSU, Clemson and Georgia Tech). I think they are planning for each team to play each school in the other division once, alternating home and away each year. Sad. When it comes to tradition versus dollars, dollars seem to win out more and more these days. But we'll always have the memories.