Now you have proven to me you have absolutely no clue what you’re talking about. Your hate for WVU just clouds your logical thinking and you grasp at straws hoping for something to happen to WVU so our fans can be as miserable as you.
First, you obviously have no clue what a mid-major is. You’re twisting the semantics to fit your agenda. Any university outside of the Power 5 football conferences shall be considered a mid-major. It gets more complex when discussing basketball because of schools like Villanova, but you should get the point. An institution with a $110+ million athletics operating budget isn’t getting relegated to becoming a mid-major. It’s just not going to happen.
Pitt and VT had NO say on whether WVU got in the ACC. The fact that you don’t know that tells me you’re clueless. VT had initially been planned to be left out until the VA legislature jumped in and strong-armed UVA, forcing them to support VPI’s inclusion. The Hokies had no power to exert as far as who gained acceptance to the conference. Pitt is even funnier. They made a “stand” right before they left and their chancellor and AD stated they were united with WVU in terms of their future conference affiliation and were committed to making the Big East stronger. Well, they lied and then they bolted in the middle of the night with Syracuse when the last-minute ACC invite arrived. They have absolutely no say in what happens in ACC land and do as they’re told by the Tobacco Road schools and UVA. UNC, Duke, and UVA run that conference and NC State, Wake Forest, and VPI do what those schools tell them to do.
Clemson and FSU might not care about WVU in particular, but they care about the lackluster football played in the rest of conference and the amount of money their peer schools are making. Do you not remember FSU’s BOT Chair publicly saying they should look at and evaluate other conference options (i.e. the Big 12) when it became clear the SEC, B1G, and Big 12 were making significantly more money in revenue and the conference landscape nationally was not stable around (2010-2012). That’s why the ACC leaders pushed to have a GOR signed. I can assure you that Clemson and FSU wanted WVU as one of the schools added when Pitt and Syracuse were invited. They wanted a school that put football first and that invested in athletics.
When it became clear that the schools running the ACC would always put basketball first and football would be an afterthought, they threatened to leave. There is a reason UL was invited instead of UConn after WVU joined the Big 12.
You can’t honestly think that WVU wasn’t invited to the SEC because of academics, can you? The two schools vying for one spot were WVU and Missouri and it came down to population, TV markets, and the number of TVs overall for the growing SEC Network, plain and simple. Go ask some real SEC fans what they think now about Missouri’s addition.
