The next scheduled meeting of the UVA Board of Visitors is a two-day meeting scheduled for Sept. 14-15, which matters in the context of the Aug. 15 deadline that comes tomorrow if the school would want to leave the ACC next summer.
You can assume that it would take a BOV vote to initiate the process to inform the ACC that UVA Athletics would be leaving the conference, and unless we all somehow missed a resolution having already been passed to that effect somewhere in the bowels of a recent board meeting, there’d have to be something in the works to get the Board of Visitors together either in person or virtually in the next 36 hours to get things moving in that direction.
Why this is newsworthy is that we’d been told two weeks ago that the Big Ten had reached out to both UVA and UNC to express interest in extending invites to the two schools as that conference seeks to expand to 20 schools.
The Big Ten had already moved last summer to add USC and UCLA for the 2024-2025 academic sports year, and earlier this month, the conference extended invites to Washington and Oregon, who are also now coming on board next July 1.
The word to us in the wake of the Big Ten’s additions of Washington and Oregon was that UVA and UNC were the Big Ten’s preferred choices to be schools 19 and 20, but if the current ACC members were to balk, the Midwest-based conference would move on to scoop up Stanford and Cal, two of the remaining four from the Pac-12, which has been gutted in this latest round of realignment.
The other news here, and I’m writing this at noon Monday, to get that on the record, is that there isn’t, at this writing, a scheduled meeting for the Florida State University Board of Trustees until a two-day meeting set for Sept. 7-8.
The FSU board, a couple of weeks ago, made noise about wanting to get its school’s athletics department out from under the aegis of the ACC.
Notable, here, in the context of where things stand at the moment with the ACC, is that the conference has reached out to leaders at Stanford, Cal and SMU, the Dallas-based school that is currently a member of the AAC, about their interest in joining the ACC, but moves toward extending formal invites have failed to get the support of 12 of the 15 current ACC members, as is required by the conference’s by-laws.
Four schools have opposed extending invites to Stanford, Cal and SMU.
Those four schools: FSU, UNC, NC State and Clemson.
Ostensibly, we could get news about ACC expansion without there needing to be any formal votes by boards of visitors, boards of trustees and the like.
I’d expect that, if we’re going to get any such news, it would be either today or tomorrow.
It’s my read on this that if we get past midnight tomorrow night with no moves in either direction – schools leaving the ACC, schools being invited to join – the ACC is going to be done with this talk for the time being, meaning, publicly, at least, into next spring and next summer.
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Chris Graham
