The ACC has failed VT since the 2004 expansion, and its time for us to make our exit

When we joined this conference in 2004, we did so coming in with the full understanding that the ACC was positioning itself to be a major power player in college football going forward. And why wouldn't they be? They already had Florida State, and when invites were extended to Miami and Virginia Tech in the summer of 2003, they had secured a conference that comprised of a member of each of the last 4 BCS National Championship Games. It was set to be a perfect marriage that set off a seismic shift in the landscape.

Except... That never happened.

Shortly after our entry, Boston College, a small private school in a professional sports city known primarily for Doug Flutie making one pass in the 1990s, was somehow extended an invite in a move that still makes you scratch your head. And then only a few years after that, the ACC follows it up with invites to Louisville, Syracuse, and Pittsburgh, in moves that the conference were not shy about their reasoning at the time. It was about basketball. The Tobacco Road schools were worried that their power and influence in the conference was being threatened so they made their move to make sure their bread continued to be buttered, completely losing focus on where everything about college athletics was going in the big picture.

Meanwhile, Virginia Tech was holding up its end of the bargain. Annually carrying the conference's flag as the main player on the national scene to the point where ESPN personalities were joking that we should rename the ACC as the Virginia Tech Conference, or at least the All Tech Conference, given Georgia Tech's ability to contend as well. No other school carried their own water during this time. Not a single one. Florida State fell into chaos with Bobby Bowden's prime falling further away, Miami completely collapsed under a revolving door of bad hires, Clemson was an annual mess under Tommy Bowden, Georgia Tech reverted to the triple option to win games, and the only other team to reach the high rankings that VT did was Boston College for a short stint in 2007. North Carolina, Duke, Virginia, Wake Forest, Syracuse and Pittsburgh all saw long sustained periods of poor performance on the field with little to no financial investment into their own programs, content with allowing their basketball prowess to remain their identity.

And in this time, what did the conference as a whole do? They signed away our regional broadcasting rights for pennies on the dollar to Raycom Sports, where the son of the Commissioner of the ACC at the time happened to be employed by and actively part of the negotiation for Raycom, only to follow that up with one of the absolute worst overall TV deals in college sports. Meanwhile, the SEC and Big Ten build football superpowers by carefully selecting schools that grew the footprint in both competitive play and carriage rights, monopolizing the competitive balance of the playoff, and effectively locking the ACC and Big 12 out of the power balance.

And now we're at the point of the competitive cycle where we're at the the moment of needing to rebuild (much like Clemson and Florida State were 15 years ago) and we're now being force fed a situation where we're being forced to accept unequal revenue sharing based on on field results, a conference that is looking to expand based on academic and non-rev competitive play, and a network provider that has us by the balls. What are we even doing anymore? How is this what is best for the future of Virginia Tech anymore? The thanks we get for keeping this conference afloat 10-15 years ago is our face shoved back into the mud by those very same schools we propped up at that time.

And on top of all of this, now we're being told by the conference that our student athletes are now going to have to travel to California twice a year in every sport to compete in conference play. Most of the players who will be doing this are non-scholarship athletes playing in non-revenue sports, completely screwing up their actual education due to travel (which is even worse for the athletes from those schools who now are exclusively traveling across country to play sports every week, but I digress). You know, because somehow having some of our students play sportsball in Atlantic Coast Conference games in California is apparently going to raise the academic profile of Virginia Tech.

To hell with all of this. Its time for Virginia Tech to wake the hell up and do what is best for us going forward. We have a legitimate football brand with a strong regional following. We shouldn't have to put up with the bullshit we're dealing with now. The ACC failed us and we should have absolutely no shame in turning our backs on them now. Its time to team up with FSU and Clemson and do what is best for us by getting the hell out.