Ask and You Shall Receive

The ACC recently announced their new divisional alignments/scheduling models for football and basketball incorporating newcomers Pitt and Syracuse. There was so much conjecture on this topic since the expansion announcement last September. Some were promoting a North and South partition (with the North Division consisting of the five former Big East schools, UVA, and Maryland). This option would have been nice for nostalgia, but I don’t think UVA and Maryland (or Virginia Tech for that matter) were too keen on that.

School	Location	Driving Distance from Hillsborough
	Durham, NC	12 miles
	Chapel Hill, NC	18 miles
	Raleigh, NC	34 miles
	Winston-Salem, NC	75 miles
	Blacksburg, VA	162 miles
	Charlottesville, VA	167 miles

For purely selfish reasons, Your Faithful Servant was holding out hope that the existing divisions would be maintained and my alma mater would be safely dropped into the Coastal Division with Virginia Tech, Miami, North Carolina, Georgia Tech, Virginia and Duke.

While we had a real entertaining series of games with the Hokies when they joined the Big East and some nice history with Miami even though they usually kicked our ass, my preference for the Coastal was strictly geography-based and selfish in nature.

I want Road Trip opportunities – lots of them – to see my Panthers. (Given our football track record over the last 30 years, you’d think I would have better sense – I guess there is a strong masochistic thing at work here. Hail to Pitt.)

Well, I guess the ACC Scheduling Gods heard and answered my prayer, because that is exactly what ended up happening. We also get yearly games with Syracuse in football and a home-and-home with Maryland in basketball.  I would like to also throw out there that both Clemson, SC and College Park,MD are within 300 miles of my house. 

So, on average, in football Pitt will be traveling each year to two out of the quartet of Duke, UNC, VaTech, and UVA. Then throw in the odd rotational game against non-division teams Wake and State every couple of years. Perfect.

Excuse me while I wipe this shit-eating grin off of my face.