Wake Forest Athletics News
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100% Cotten
Oct. 3, 2003 100% Cotten is written by Voice of the Deacons Stan Cotten, a past North Carolina Broadcaster of the Year, published in conjunction with Gold Rush, the official newspaper of Wake Forest athletics.
Right out of the gate let me say that I'm certainly no expert the ACC or its history. I'm only in my eighth season in the league that celebrated its rich 50-year history last year. But it doesn't take an expert to see that things have changed. Big time. And whether or not they have changed for the better is a matter of opinion. On October 1st the ACC announced details about the scheduling of conference football and basketball games in the near future - a future that now includes recent additions Virginia Tech and Miami. Surely a twelfth team will be added soon. But that is not a guarantee. The scheduling announcement sent immediate shock waves through the league and its fan base when, in black and white, ACC football and basketball teams saw both whom they were and were not going to be playing regularly. Traditionalists are trembling. And so is everybody else. This is a topic that stirs. There are definitely ripples in the water. For the Deacons - here's how the new scheduling boils down. In football, Wake Forest says good-bye to playing Virginia and Georgia Tech for the next two seasons and hello to Miami and Virginia Tech, ranked 2nd and 4th respectively at press time. Throw in fifth-rated Florida State and the Deacs already have an eyebrow-raising schedule. ESPN.com in its announcement of the new schedule said that Wake Forest joined North Carolina State, North Carolina and Virginia as teams who got "stuck with three powers" when all was said and done. Buckle your chinstraps Deacon fans, and welcome to the new ACC. In basketball, the league adopted a 16-game schedule. The Demon Deacons lose the guarantee of an annual home game and road game with long-time rivals Duke and North Carolina. And that is a shame no matter how you slice it. There was room for the league to adopt a 20-game schedule and keep the tradition of every ACC team playing every other league team twice, something advocated by Wake Forest head coach Skip Prosser, but in the end that option was not adopted. The Deacs primary partners in the reshaping are North Carolina State and Georgia Tech and are guaranteed to play the Deacs twice every season. Wake Forest will then have home and away series with four other schools and single games against the league's other four schools - with North Carolina and Duke guaranteed to be two of these latter four. Having the football series with Virginia, Jim Grobe's alma mater, go away is too bad. The last three games between the two have been decided a total of eleven points, and despite a lopsided edge in the series in favor of the Cavaliers, one could almost sense a kind of rivalry developing. We'll have to stay tuned. In basketball, what can you say? Duke and North Carolina are two of the more storied programs in the history of college basketball. And having no guarantee of playing each twice in the same season anymore seems almost criminal. But that is the ball that has been passed. What will we do with it? This is certainly not your father's ACC. It is ours. And it will be what we make of it. |