RE: ACC Commissioner John Swofford to retire
Orange - you are missing the point - the ACC did not form out of whole cloth. It was not put together as a new construct but was a reverse way of tossing out the small schools plus WVa and VT who had pissed off MD and Clemson on a personal level.
The Newspapers of Record for the formation of the ACC is the Greensboro News and Record and the Richmond Times Dispatch. Two generations before Dave Teel there was Bill Brill.
There is NOTHING new about the ACC or the actions of its members that is any different from 1921 to 1953 to 2012.
SOUTHERN/ACC SPLIT SURPRISED SOME
BY LARRY KEECH Staff Writer Feb 25, 1996 Updated Jan 25, 2015
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Few remember the watershed event that split the ACC from the Southern Conference in Greensboro 43 years ago.
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For an institution like a college athletic conference, 75 years may not seem like an especially long history.
Many lifetimes are longer.And yet, it's safe to say that no one who attends this weekend's Southern Conference basketball tournament at the Greensboro Coliseum can remember the watershed event in SC history that took place 43 years ago and only a few miles down High Point Road.
Few of the first-hand witnesses to the division of the Southern Conference and formation of the Atlantic Coast Conference in 1953 are still living in 1996.
The Southern Conference became the original collegiate athletic alliance in the South when it was formed in 1921. Within a decade, it grew to encompass 23 member schools in the old Confederate crescent that stretched from Virginia to Louisiana.
In 1932, the conference's sheer geographical unwieldiness and the impracticality of competitive travel prompted the 13 members south and west of the Appalachian mountains to split and form the Southeastern Conference.
During the next 20 years, the growth of college sports was accompanied by expansion of the SC from 10 teams to 17.
But by the early 1950s, other problems resulted from the conference's size and diversity. While some of the larger state institutions began to commit their resources to big-time, big-budget football programs, administrators of smaller schools sought to de-emphasize athletics in relation to academic interests. Competitive imbalance and political differences resulted.
The key issues came to a head as early as the 1951 football season. Earlier that year, college sports had encountered scandals involving the ``fixing' of basketball games by players and ``cribbing' or classroom cheating among football players on Army's nationally prominent team.
In September 1951, the NCAA Council issued 12 recommendations for its members for the conduct of college athletics. They included limiting the number of games in each sport and reevaluating postseason games because of the pressures they created.
Dr. Gordon Gray, president of the University of North Carolina, called a meeting of Southern Conference presidents in Chapel Hill later that month ``for the purpose of discussing ways and means of effecting improvement in the organization, management and direction of intercollegiate athletics.'
At the meeting, the presidents forwarded a recommendation that the conference adopt a rule to abolish bowl games and declared an intent to refuse permission for any school to participate in a bowl game on New Year's Day, 1952.
Jim Tatum, the football coach who had built a powerhouse team at Maryland, wasn't about to sit still and accept such a ruling. Also the Maryland athletics director, Tatum knew he enjoyed the support of H.C. ``Curley' Byrd, Maryland's president and himself a former Terrapin football coach.
Even though Tatum's Maryland team completed a perfect 9-0 season in '51, the Terps' 5-0 record earned them only a share of the Southern Conference championship with VMI, which beat five generally lesser SC opponents and finished 7-3.
Maryland then contracted to face Tennessee in the Sugar Bowl before seeking sanction from the conference in the SC's annual December meeting, choosing to assume that the sanction would be a formality as it had been in the past. The conference, however, voted 14-3 to deny permission to Maryland and voted 12-5 to adopt a resolution that would place any member on probation for a year if it participated in a bowl game in 1952 or thereafter.
Not only did Maryland play in the Sugar Bowl, beating Tennessee 28-13, but Clemson played in the Gator Bowl the same day, losing to Miami 14-0.
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Frank Howard, Clemson's coach and athletics director, became Tatum's first ally in breaking from the Southern Conference. Clemson played only two conference games in the fall of '52, losing to Maryland and South Carolina. Maryland played no others.
By the time the Southern Conference held a spring meeting at Greensboro's Sedgefield Inn on a weekend in May 1953, Tatum and Howard had mustered enough political support to split the Southern Conference in half.
Maryland and Clemson were joined by South Carolina and North Carolina's Big Four - Duke, UNC, N.C. State and Wake Forest - in breaking with the SC to form a new conference.
The day before that meeting began, the presidents of those schools had met in Chapel Hill and endorsed the split.
Although there had been rumblings about such a division, it took place with stunning suddenness.
``I think most of the people left in it (the Southern Conference) were surprised,' Wallace Wade, the longtime Duke football coach, was quoted as saying some years ago.
``It was a complete surprise to me, and I thought I knew Duke about as well as anybody,' said Wade, who became the SC's commissioner in 1951 and held the same job for both conferences until the summer of '54. ``I knew there was interest in it, and I knew they were talking about it, but I had no idea they had developed a program the extent that they had when they sprang it in Greensboro that day.'
Later in 1953, the membership of the new league voted to name it the Atlantic Coast Conference, instead of the Mid-South Conference or the South Atlantic Conference. They were soon joined by Virginia, which had left the Southern Conference and pursued independent status since 1937.
After the ACC split, the Southern Conference membership consisted of The Citadel, Davidson, Furman, George Washington, Richmond, VMI, Virginia Tech, Washington & Lee, West Virginia and William & Mary.
Only four of those schools remain in the Southern Conference in 1996. VMI has been a member since 1924. The Citadel, Davidson and Furman joined in '36.
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ACC Commissioner John Swofford to retire
