ACC Realignment: New Superconferences Will Destroy College Sports

With all the other major conferences in college football undergoing radical changes, or at least rumored to be undergoing changes, it only makes sense that the Big East and ACC would get in the mix. But all this conference shifting will prove to be the death knell for the "mid-major" conferences in college sports.

It was reported on Saturday that Pitt and Syracuse applied to and were accepted into the ACC after spending the last three decades in the Big East. The official announcement is expected to happen early Sunday morning, but ESPN.com says that the members of the ACC have already voted the schools in.

This is just the latest attempt by the "major" conference schools to prevent the smaller schools from cutting in on their territory.

The Big East is going to reach a point, if it hasn't already, where it is so bad that its status as a major conference is going to be questioned by the Commissioners and Presidents of the five other major conferences—SEC, ACC, Big 12, Pac-12, Big Ten—and they could take away the conference’s automatic BCS berth.

That will take away $13 million from the Big East every season, and the teams in the conference will no longer be able to compete with the power conferences.

With so many teams moving into the same conference, you have to factor in the watered-down schedule that teams will be playing in both football and basketball.

Syracuse and Pittsburgh are not exactly world beaters in football, which means that the top teams in the conference—specifically Virginia Tech and Florida State—will be given one more cheap victory every season.

The monopoly that the NCAA has created with these new superconferences is bad for all college sports, not just football and basketball.

The smaller schools who have the potential to grow into quality programs, like Boise State has done over the last decade, will find it more and more difficult to schedule games against elite schools because they will only have to play each other, and everyone else will be left in the dark.

Of course, we shouldn't be surprised by anything that these power conferences do anymore.

Ever since Boise State emerged as a national power, and mid-major teams have been sneaking their way into the Final Four during March Madness, these schools have been trying to do whatever they can to get rid of the little guys.

If this conference realigning keeps going at the rate it is, it will not be long before we are down to four major superconferences—SEC, ACC, Big Ten and Pac-16—and all the other conferences will be left fishing for scraps.