Team #16?

[Hateful Hokie]

If ND joins the ACC, who should be team #16 and why? This, of course, recognizes that the league would have to have a compelling reason to offer a program in a power conference to move (either from a school's perspective or the league's). Otherwise, the move would have to be largely speculative, based on things like: enrollment, academics/compatability, support, fan base, TV footprint, legacy.

A lot of folks talk about UConn or Rutgers, but the arguments for each are lukewarm at best. Considering the geography of adding ND, I'm wondering about Cincy. Thoughts?

I ardently disagreed with this at first but I have since come around--if you add Notre Dame that should be it. Stay at 15. In football and basketball you can have 3 5-team pods. In bball the 5 teams play an 8-game round robin and then the remaining 10 schools once for 18 in-conference games. Every 6 years the ACC tournament should be played twice in Greensboro, Washington, D.C. and Madison Squares Garden. Bball is perfect. Football--not so much, but the concept is there...

In football you split into 3 pods also with Notre Dame, Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Boston College and Maryland in 1 pod; Virginia, North Carolina, NC State, Duke and and Wake Forest in 1 pod; and Florida State, Miami, Clemson, Georgia Tech and Virginia Tech in the third pod, which would allow the ACC to market its very best match-ups, which would occur annually. This way you split the marginal revenue of ND 15 ways rather than adding a crappy 16th team plus ESPN would get additional big annual match-ups with new annual rivals Clemson/VT, Clemson/Miami, FSU/GT, FSU/VT. That's at least 2 new big games every year. In the north and Carolina pods, you could even have Virginia and Maryland swap pods every year or something like that.

The arrangement allows Virginia Tech to remain southern focused, preserves some of Notre Dame's best rivalries (BC and Pitt), keeps travel to a minimum, increases big game match-ups, allows the Carolina schools to play together and keeps UVa with its top rival (according to them) UNC. And you play every team every other year. FSU and Clemson get improved schedules and georgraphic divisions, something they've been clamoring for. The major issue with this is VT loses its annual game against UVa and Maryland becomes isolated from its ACC brethren and it ups VT's travel costs.

15 also leaves room for the future Penn States or South Carolinas of college football to eventually join (who knows what could happen in 20 years?!).