ACC Roundtable: Pre-Bowling Edition
by BirdGT on Dec 8, 2010 8:00 AM EST
in Georgia Tech Football
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BCI: Virginia Tech and Florida State seemed to acquit the ACC Championship Game well this year, turning in an entertaining 44-33 game in front of a crowd of 72,379 at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte. Assess the success of the ACC Championship Game in Charlotte in year one. How much of the success can be attributed to the host city, and how much can be attributed to the matchup? A little of A, a little of B?
FTRS: Average driving distance for the past 10 ACC Championship participants - 593 miles. Average driving distance for FSU and VT in 2010 - 316 miles. Charlotte literally is a day trip for GT, VT, UVA, NC State, UNC, Wake, Duke, and Clemson fans. The odds are pretty good that 2 of those 8 ACC teams will be in the game next year. Charlotte is a huge improvement over an ACCCG in Florida particularly compared to college football apathetic Tampa and SEC country Jacksonville.
BCI: Would you like to see Charlotte become the permanent home of the ACC Football Championship? Or would you be in favor of some alternate Championship Game format? (continuing to rotate the location, move to campus a la the Pac 12, etc.) Explain.
FTRS: A campus championship would be great but, to me, a Championship Game should allow more fans of both teams to attend not just one fan base. A game at Wake Forest might have seats for 1,500 away fans while a game at Clemson could host several thousand. A neutral site just makes sense in that we don't have a round robin regular season. A neutral site Championship Game provides a true on-the-field Champion.
BCI: On to the ACC's 2010 slate of bowl games. How happy are you with your program's bowl placement? Did your team's bowl destination exceed or fall short of preseason expectations? (No, I didn't forget about you, Wake and Virginia. You can speak to general season results relative to preseason expectations here).
FTRS: I'll be blunt. Shreveport sucks. It's a pretty far for most Tech fans (9.5 hours from ATL). We're playing a good opponent, which is promising but I don't see the average Tech fan making the trip especially considering we finished the season in disappointing fashion. Shreveport is on the East-ish Coast and most modern Tech fans are just happy with East Coast bowl bids. Personally, I thought the season was pretty disappointing and if there was a GT team that didn't deserve a bowl bid since 2003, it was this team. We only beat one I-A team with a winning record, feasting on cupcakes while choking on the prime rib.
BCI: Looking at the conference's bowl schedule as a whole, how many games do you have the conference winning? Is this the year the conference has a breakout year come bowl season?
FTRS: I think there are two guaranteed losses on the schedule: VT-Stanford and BC-Nevada (sorry, Brian). There are two draws: GT-Air Force and NC State-WVU. Then, the rest should be wins. That'd leave the conference with at best a 7-2 record and at worst a 5-4 record. I think that'd be a pretty good finish considering the conference's relatively poor OOC performance this season.
BCI: Clearly, there are many factors other than on-field performance that go into bowl selections (travel rep, ticket sales, travel distances). Pretend for a moment that the ACC placed teams in our conference's bowl games 1-9 based solely on their on-field performance this season (you can rank 1-9 anyway you see fit). Holding our bowl opponents fixed, how does your answer to question 4 change? Does the ACC then win more or less bowl games this year?
FTRS: I think the ACC wins about the same. The lack of consistency throughout the middle of conference pecking order (Clemson, GT, NC State, Miami, UNC) really hurts my bowl predicting abilities. I don't think anyone will be able to predict how some of these ACC teams will perform considering the late season disappointments or head coach terminations.
BCI: Last one. The home of the ACC Champion has been the redheaded step child of BCS bowls the past few seasons. The Orange Bowl has been awarded either the Big East champ or a BCS at-large leftover the past few seasons and the casual fan has responded with some of the lowest TV ratings in BCS bowl history. Did the Hokies/ACC dodge a bullet not drawing an 8-4 Big East champ UConn in the Orange Bowl? Or would you have rather have had the Hokies face an easier opponent to improve on the ACC's 2-10 record in BCS bowls?
FTRS: Ratings-wise, no the Hokies did not dodge the bullet. Iowa had a bigger fan base than Stanford last season and our Orange Bowl was still the worst rated BCS bowl. An at large team has no draw. No really cares about Stanford outside of Andrew Luck's potential #1 Draft pick status but that's relatively irrelevant to the average CFB fan. It's sort of like playing Wake Forest on steroids as far as TV ratings are concerned. So prepare to be the lowest rated BCS game again Orange Bowl.
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Alright...
The first question and answer needs to be addressed before I read the rest of this thing:
1. The FSU-VT game was not entertaining. It was a blowout. VT nearly doubled up the score on FSU before the last second, garbage time TD. And as far as attendance, it was less than the first game in Jacksonville that pitted, you guessed it, FSU and VT.
2. Your answer started out accurate, stating that Charlotte was a good place for the championship game because it’s so close to many schools. Then you end bashing Tampa and Jacksonville. It is not the responsibility of the host city to fill the game. It’s the responsibility of the schools. A game that includes Boston College will not sell in Florida, because it’s a long trip from Boston to Jax/Tampa. If you want to look at average distance between schools, look at the correlation between avg. distance and attendance. You’ll see it’s probably close to -1 (there’s also evidence to show that it’s the FSU fanbase that supports larger crowds, but there’s not enough data to know for sure).
I think a city
like Charlotte or Atlanta would have a lot of fans go to the game that aren’t fans of either team as opposed to Jacksonville who has little interest in the Jaguars and is a UF hotbed. Tampa is just starting to like CFB but is still not gonna draw fans like a game in ATL or Charlotte would, imo.
I write stuff From the Rumble Seat.
I agree
The Peach / Chick-fi-lay (or whatever they call it this year) has always had good attendance compared to these Florida venues.
by Atlanta's original team on Dec 8, 2010 12:53 PM EST up reply actions
Atlanta is central
to both the SEC and the ACC, and most SEC schools have very large fanbases. That’s why that game has such good attendance. It’s not because all the people in Atlanta go to see it just for the fun of it.
Not sure
where you’re getting your information from, but Jacksonville has more than a “little” interest in the Jaguars, and the Florida-Georgia game sells out every year. That’s not from the everyday citizens of Jacksonville (which also has many FSU fans included in there). Those are Florida fans and Georgia fans making the short trip to Jacksonville. Again, the first ACC Championship game in Jacksonville holds the mark for highest attended game. Jacksonville didn’t lose interest in the ACC as a city; but BC fans, VT fans, and Wake Forest fans didn’t make the long trip down.
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