by Jay Parchman, recruit757
With all of the fervor of the football season, the bowls and National Signing Day, did anyone forget that the ACC is expanding by two teams? The actual effective date of the expansion hasn’t been set yet, but the ACC announced the new divisional alignments and scheduling matrix yesterday after their winter meetings that took place in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
The 2012 football season may go on as originally scheduled, meaning that Pitt and Syracuse will likely stay put in the Big East for one more season. The arrival of the two schools will rekindle some rivalries that had been in place in the earlier days of the Big East.
Pitt will move into the Coastal Division where they’ll join Duke, Georgia Tech, Miami, North Carolina, Virginia and Virginia Tech. Syracuse will enter the Atlantic Division and join Boston College, Clemson, Florida State, Maryland, N.C. State and Wake Forest.
In football, each team will play a nine game conference schedule with an imbalance of four or five ACC home games depending on the year. Each program will play six games in against their division opponents, one game against a primary crossover partner and two games against rotating opponents from the other division. Pitt and Syracuse become cross-division rivals and will play annually. The other crossover partners are Florida State/Miami, Clemson/Georgia Tech, North Carolina/N.C. State, Duke/Wake Forest, Virginia/ Maryland, and Virginia Tech/Boston Colllege. Those are the same partnerships that had been in place.
That means every program will play the same seven opponents in conference every year, and they’ll rotate the other six opponents in two-year home-and-home arrangements for a six-year schedule rotation.
Virginia Tech and Pitt played each other annually in the Big East Conference prior to Tech’s departure for the ACC. They last played in 2003 and will play for the first time in nine season when they meet in a non-conference game at Heinz Field in Pittsburgh on September 15.
Syracuse and Boston College had annual out-of-conference football games scheduled beginning in 2013, but will change with the Orangemen’s introduction to the ACC.
A steady diet of games in the Mid-Atlantic could lead to more football recruiting here in the region by Pitt and Syracuse. Pitt will play annual games against both Virginia and Virginia Tech, and Syracuse will have annual games against Maryland, N.C. State and Wake Forest. Not bad for a recruit looking to play ACC football at a school out-of-state.
- Jay Parchman
