Friday, February 03, 2012

Syracuse officially in Atlantic Division

The ACC announced that Syracuse will be slotted in the Atlantic and Pitt will join the Coastal. On the basketball side, Syracuse will be our designated "rival" and the rest of the teams will rotate on and off BC's schedule. This is good news on multiple fronts.


For football this is great. BC's history with Syracuse is long and meaningful to older fans and Alumni. We were scheduled to play them over the next decade so this doesn't dramatically increase the difficulty of our schedule. When it was a non-conference game, it was designed to be the final regular season game for both teams. Now that it is a conference game, that matchup can be guaranteed. The expansion also means the ACC regular season will expand to nine games too. That's a mixed blessing for BC fans. We will now have more meaningful games, but fewer opportunities for exciting non-conference games. BC also keeps Virginia Tech as its permanent cross-division game.


Basketball will now play Syracuse twice every year. All the other schools will rotated in a tiered basis. We will not play Miami and Virginia Tech twice every year. This schedule will help interest but will hurt BC's chances to pad our win total. Despite their recent successes, I think playing Miami and VT twice in hoops annually was going to be beneficial to BC. I have doubt about either school ever becoming dominant powers in hoops. Now we will play a more balanced schedule ACC schedule, which will probably be harder.

3 comments:

Jeff said...

Huzzah! Was looking forward to the Syracuse series, and now that can proceed (and be even more meaningful as a conference game).

mod34b said...

Nice to have Syracuse in the division, but too bad we must still play VT every year.

CT said...

yeah mod, maybe we should break away and play cornell and columbia every year owing to their equitable student-athlete profile. give me a break.