Conference Call

By Charlie Barnes, Guest Columnist

With apologies to Charles Dickens, let’s call this A Tale of Three Conferences.

There was a time when the old Southwest Conference bullied its way muscular and loud across the landscape of college football. They had their own bowl, the Cotton Bowl, once revered as one of the four elite “big” bowls in a time when only a handful of teams got to go bowling at all at the end of the season.

In those days not so long ago the Southeastern Conference was a good, regional outfit that featured Alabama as its most consistent power. But the SEC carried less national appeal than the glamorous Southwest Conference with its perennial title contenders and their iconic Texas swagger.

You may have not ever heard this phrase, “Texas was a country before it was a state,” but every Texas schoolchild can recite the story chapter and verse. The SWC was all-and-everything that is Texas. The Arkansas Razorbacks with 13 SWC Football Championships and a National Championship in 1964, was the only out-of-state program. And it is said that the Longhorns finally pushed Arkansas out of their Texas-only fraternity.

Forty years ago the neighborhood began to change. Texas won the National Championship in 1970, but Pro Football began to muscle its way into the big Texas markets of Dallas and Houston. The state was no longer just about Texas schoolboys and college football.

There was also a growing disparity between the Southwest Conference’s public universities and the smaller, private schools. During the 1960s alone the number of students attending the University of Texas doubled. The main campuses of both Texas and Texas A&M each have 50,000-plus students. When Texas played Rice in Houston, there were more Longhorn alumni in the stands than Rice Owl fans.

The third enterprise that brought about the end of the SWC was cheating. The SWC schools outdid each other competing for the available talent. What was it they used to say in the Old West? “God made men, but Sam Colt made them equal.” The conference was overtaken by the gunslinger mentality; do whatever you gotta do, pardner.

It was so bad at the end that the only SWC schools not on NCAA probation were Arkansas, who was out the door, Baylor and Rice. And the Bears’ and Owls’ miserable records were confirmation of their purity.

The bottom line is that conferences prosper or fall because of the decisions they make. The SWC committed suicide. The Southeastern Conference reigns today because of media money, brilliant marketing and unified leadership.

There were Florida State fans who were not in favor of joining the ACC, who believed then and still do that a better place for FSU may have been the SEC. While I won't debate them, I do disagree with some of our fans who believe that the ACC has been making bad decisions. To those who feel that the ACC leadership has been acting against its own self-interest and ours, let me offer that the ACC has in fact been making smart decisions, playing to its own strengths. Florida State will benefit, but sometimes it’s hard for us to see that because of our place in the Conference culture.

There’s a practical reason why the ACC is a basketball conference, just as there are significant cultural differences between the ACC and the SEC. Much of it has to do with private universities and the private school mentality.

If some of this sounds dark, stay with me; I promise a happy ending.

Let’s consider conference culture.

The Southeastern Conference has only one private university: Vanderbilt.

Here are the private schools of the ACC: Syracuse, Duke, Wake Forest, Miami, Boston College, and Notre Dame.

Pitt was private until 1966. The University of North Carolina behaves as if it is a private institution, and University of Virginia alumni always seem mildly surprised to learn that they’re a public school.

The signature universities of the SEC tend to be massive land-grant institutions with large student populations, prosperous alumni and huge football stadiums. The ACC on the other hand has a substantial contingent of private universities, and private universities tend toward smaller student bodies, high academics and wealthy alumni. That’s important because wealthy alumni want to win and, if you want to win the ACC, demographic favors basketball over football.

We are interested primarily in what is best for Florida State. That is as it should be. You and I will continue to be Seminoles regardless of whether we are in a conference or not. That kind of commitment can be maddening and frustrating, but there it is. I’ve told the story about a young attorney in Miami whose response after a loss to Miami was to rip the metal Seminole tag off the front of his Mercedes with his bare hands and fling it into Biscayne Bay.

He reacted so strongly because he knew he was committed to the Seminoles for life, and we are always the most passionate about the things we love. And on another occasion long ago, after another galling loss, it fell to that same man to be the leader; to reassure his peers. “It’s not about money,” he told them. “It’s about the heart.” Well, it is about money, but in this business the money follows the heart.

That man, now more than 30 years removed from the adventure on Biscayne, is finishing his tenure as chairman of the Board of Trustees.

The ACC invited us, and later Miami, to become members in order to enhance its football profile. For our first eight years in the conference we Seminoles were the perennial contenders and carried the ACC banner in five bowl games that decided the National Championship.

But after 2000, the truth is we didn’t continue to hold up our end of the deal. Neither has Miami. In the recent decade we have not continued to bring the degree of national prominence that we once did, and some of what we did bring to the party was unfortunate. Some fans refer to it as “The Lost Decade.” We weren’t lost, exactly. We went to a bowl game every year and we never had a losing season. No, not lost, but it was as if we were wandering through the parking lot, frustrated, clicking our electric keys and unable to find our car.

Those headlights flashing back at us from the distance may be exactly what we’ve been searching for. After our Sept. 22 win over Clemson, Florida State remained at No. 4 in the polls, but we picked up one single first-place vote in the coaches’ poll. That is the first regular-season first place vote our Seminoles have received in 10 years.

No, the ACC can’t be blamed for looking elsewhere to shore up its house. They added Syracuse and Pitt, neither of which offers much in terms of football credentials in the last 30 years. However, now with Duke, North Carolina and Syracuse, the ACC has three of the top five most successful basketball programs in NCAA history. And beginning in 2002, Pitt has achieved 10 straight seasons with at least 20 wins and as many consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances.

And the ACC’s addition of Notre Dame was an inspired bit of magic. The announcement came as a surprise to just about everyone and I’m sure that was by design. I choose to be optimistic that there continue to be quiet negotiations aimed at bringing Notre Dame in as a full member of the household, not just as a boarder.

The Irish are having a great year in 2012, and although Notre Dame may not be quite the Holy Grail of conference acquisition that it once was, the addition is certainly most welcome to a conference in search of football credibility. In recent years, Notre Dame has been like a popular singer who’s past his prime but he can still pack the house. The voice may not be as fresh and he may forget the lyrics from time to time, but he’s a great entertainer and we all applaud enthusiastically because he reminds us of who he was, and who we were, in the blush of our youth.

Because the ACC is not perceived to be a football-first league, we have to endure insults both real and imagined, some innocent and others mean, or perhaps crafted to give someone else a recruiting advantage. The week of Sept. 4, Fox Sports College Football website posted a poll asking “Which College Football Conference is the strongest top to bottom?” They gave four choices - the ACC was not one. And after the Wake game, ESPN’s Heather Dinich asked Jimbo something to the effect of what’s it like to operate in the shadow of the SEC. Jimbo bristled righteous as he should have and answered in very Bowden-esque syntax, “We’re Florida State; we don’t operate in the shadow of nobody.”

Fans forget. We used to suffer the same kind of questions when we were an independent but it didn’t matter. When you’re winning consistently, no one cares about that sort of thing. Sometimes I fear that some of our younger fans do not remember what it was like during the dynasty years when the biggest fan complaint we heard was that we had to go back to New Orleans and the Sugar Bowl too many times in a row. “What? Antoine’s again!?”

If Jimbo Fisher turns out to be the program builder we all hoped he would be, this passage of the Florida State story will be happy indeed. It has always been true that winning opens the door to everything else. Think of the different conferences as hotels, and the various conference members (as they drift in and out of membership) as the guests. When a popular musical act comes to town, no one really cares which hotel they choose. It’s only after the band takes the stage and begins to play that the applause begins. So it is with the conferences; what happens on the field is what people remember.

The addition of Notre Dame is an improvement to the property; it makes the ACC a more prestigious hotel in which to stay. But the only thing that really matters is what happens after we leave the room and head downstairs to the field to play. When we win consistently, all is well.

Where’s the happy ending? Well here it is.

The ACC already has some decent football programs. All we really need for the conference to have football credibility is just one program that delivers, that strides tall and proud across the national stage. The ACC needs just one program with the profile of an Alabama.

That program used to be us. Cross your fingers; that very well might be us again. Go ‘Noles.