ACC Realignment: Coack K Right to Be Upset About Splitting League into Pods

Love him or hate him, you've got to admit that legendary Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski is an intelligent man, and that he's spot-on in trashing the ACC's "pod" proposal.

The idea, which has been the subject of much speculation surrounding the ACC's football-driven expansion, would split the conference into four regional mini-divisions, or pods, should the league grow to 16 teams if invitations are extended to, say, Notre Dame, Texas, Rutgers and/or Connecticut. Teams would be guaranteed to play their pod mates each year in football and twice in basketball in a home-and-away series.

Coach K was anything but shy in expressing his displeasure with the notion at Duke's preseason media day:

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"And anytime I hear the word 'pod,' it makes me vomit...I think that's one of the worst business models there could possibly be. I just break out in a rash when I hear it. You've got to be kidding me. A pod."

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As much as this may seem like just another scoffing-off by the at-times elitist Blue Devils head man, the potential for pods would, in fact, be a bad move for the ACC. Rearranging the league into regional pods would essentially nullify whatever national appeal the conference would otherwise have in expanding its presence across the country.

For example, putting the Carolina schools—Duke, North Carolina, North Carolina State and Wake Forest—into one pod would create a sort of bubble within a bubble, as teams would have fewer opportunities to branch out into other regions of the country and recruit on a national level. The Carolina schools don't need any help extending their brand to Tobacco Road, since they're already there.

Keeping those schools from playing semi-regularly against the likes of Syracuse, Pittsburgh and Florida State, among others, would then be counter-intuitive to having a less-than-regional conference in the first place.

Splitting the league into pods might actually seem like a good thing to some, given that it would accentuate the sort of regionalism that college sports fans and pundits alike have been crying out for since realignment ramped up in the summer of 2010. Pods would seemingly allow the conference to maintain some semblance of an attachment to its lower Atlantic roots, at least in parts.

But, once again, what benefit would it be to Coach K if his team doesn't get to play in New York or Pennsylvania while other schools do? The same question could be posed to Virginia or Virginia Tech, which would likely be grouped with Maryland and perhaps Pitt in a mid-coastal pod.

The real problem with such a proposal is that the ACC can't have its cake and eat it too—it can't attempt to maintain a regional conference while so blatantly expanding its presence nationally without compromising one, the other or both. If commissioner John Swofford wants to add schools in the Northeast, the Midwest and the Southwest, then he needs to make the growth worthwhile to the league's current members by allowing them all to play one another on a more equitable basis.

Otherwise, the ACC may simply fall victim to the sort of bloated infighting that has plagued other leagues over the years and may yet be the undoing of the Big East.