Fitting into ACC culture has been contentious at times

By Charlie Barnes, Executive Director - Seminole Boosters

My wife and I took our bad dog to the dog psychiatrist.

Rex isn’t just a bad dog — he is a profoundly bad dog. His longhaired, five-pound self sits squarely on the crossroads of bad genes, low self-esteem, indifference to personal habits and a lack of social skills.

His single virtue is a passionate love for my wife that borders on psychosis. His devotion to her consumes every one of his tiny thoughts, few that they are.

Our real problem with Rex is that he considers my wife and himself to be a couple, and he sees no reason for me to be there at all. He sleeps with us (yes, but that’s another story), and from time to time, I will wake up in the night and turn to look at Connie’s sweet, sleeping face.

Staring back at me always are the two watchful red eyes of her guardian, and the expression is very clear: “What exactly do you have in mind?”

And so there we sat, each of us in our separate chairs with Rex between us. Dr. Brown smiled and said, “Here’s the thing. He’s a boy dog and you’re a male rival, and he just doesn’t like you. He never will.” (That’ll be $50 please; pay on your way out. Thank you.)

He just doesn’t like you.

It’s so clear, so simple. And with that realization came a fuller understanding on my part of Florida State University’s relationship with the Atlantic Coast Conference.

When Florida State joined the ACC in 1991, two things were predicted to happen, but neither unfolded as envisioned. First, it was assumed Seminole basketball would add muscle to its own stature in this toughest of all basketball boot camps and emerge as a prominent competitor on the national stage. Second, it was supposed that the quality of ACC football would dramatically improve with competition from the Seminoles. Florida State was to be the tide that raised all the ACC boats.

Of course, neither of those things happened quite that way.

Across the last fifteen years, the greatest achievements of Seminole basketball remain concentrated in those early, 1991-92-93 seasons at the beginning of our ACC tenure. The ACC Brahmins, no doubt chortling at their own cleverness, scheduled the Seminoles to begin their basketball tutelage in the Dean Dome, home of the North Carolina Tarheels, the night of Dec. 15, 1991. They even staged a welcome-to-the-ACC ceremony prior to the game, sort of like the gladiators offering to straighten the ties of the condemned for the amusement of the crowd.

However, departing from the prepared script, our Charlie Ward and Bob Sura-led team waxed North Carolina 86-74 and walked off the court with a shrug. So this is basketball? In the locker room, Sam Cassell offered his now famous off-hand comment about the sedate UNC fans: “They’re sort of a wine and cheese crowd.”

That was the night the ACC began to dislike the Seminoles.

Our basketball has not been consistently competitive since then. The Pat Kennedy era gave way to the unfortunate Steve Robinson era. I do believe that current Coach Leonard Hamilton is the right man for us, but his program has yet to find quite the required traction.

Football is first in the hearts of most of our fans, and in that way we are distinguished from most of the ACC. It is not just the sport of basketball, but the basketball culture, that defined the ACC for the forty years prior to our entry into the league. Anything that threatened to dilute that culture was dismissed and kept at a quarantine distance.

By the end of the 1980s ACC football had become dangerously weak. ACC football coaches and directors of athletics lobbied Commissioner Gene Corrigan to recruit a football power into the club, a program that could elevate the television exposure and credibility of the entire League. FSU wanted to join a prestigious conference and the ACC wanted a ringer. It was an arranged marriage agreeable to all parties.

From the beginning, Florida State was seen as a mercenary hired to boost football. In the Old West, the gunslinger brought in to clean up the town was expected to leave after all the bad men had been dispatched. The problem for the ACC, of course, was that once Florida State came to town, we intended to stay.

The shock of all this did not rest easy upon the brows of the ACC faithful. In their secret hearts, they suspected FSU football was overrated. They were confident that we would be given our comeuppance by ACC teams they believed were far better than their reputation. But unfortunately, the state of ACC football was about as advertised.

Our first five years in the conference, the Seminoles’ average margin of victory — this is not a misprint — was more than four touchdowns. In our 1993 national championship season, the entire ACC scored only 51 total points against the Seminoles. It took four years for us to lose a league game, and ten years for us to lose to an ACC opponent at home. That’s a lot to be unhappy about when you’re on the receiving end week after week.

More telling still is the fact that no new rival ever emerged from the ACC ranks to challenge and enliven Florida State. Oh, to be sure, Chuck Amato handed us our first at-home ACC loss and his quarterback handled us roughly a few times, but no one from the ACC came to replace Miami or Florida among our most cherished hatreds.

Almost immediately in those early days, Florida State fans noticed that the officiating of FSU football games seemed to feature a certain level of creativity on the part of ACC crews. With few exceptions, all of the game officials lived in North Carolina or in the surrounding landscape, and were all graduates of or loyalists to universities which were not ours.

At first, we fans gave them the benefit of the doubt. “These ACC officials are just not used to the speed of an FSU or a Miami or Florida,” we’d say. But year after year, league games were routinely punctuated by breathtakingly bad calls, or non-calls, or calls that defied any attempt to explain them. Of course our athletic department spokesmen and the football staff were forbidden to comment publicly, but the truth was that week after week FSU sent written complaints and film of bad officiating to the Conference office. Not only was there rarely any satisfactory response, often there was simply no response at all.

But this past February 4th, during a basketball game between the Seminoles and #2-ranked Blue Devils, the familiar ACC nod and wink was finally overwhelmed by a chorus of outrage from the national television audience. The combination of a phantom technical against Seminole Alexander Johnson, and the series of non-calls against Duke’s Sheldon Williams, was so egregious that the ACC announced formal suspension of the officiating crew.

One columnist wrote, “The Seminoles dominated the paint yet lost the game on the 32-shot discrepancy at the foul line. [Duke’s] Sheldon Williams could have played three overtimes without picking up his fifth foul.”

Although Seminole football might have slipped just a bit since 2000, the negative inclination toward Florida State was re-energized by recent conference expansion. The ACC blames FSU – correctly, of course – for orchestrating the expansion from 9 to 12 teams. The last thing ACC fans wanted was to invite more of Florida State’s hoodlum friends into the league.

Make no mistake, the blue-blood Virginia Cavaliers view the wild hill people from Virginia Tech much the same as the Drysdales viewed the Clampetts. And if ACC fans think a trip to Blacksburg is rough, I cannot wait to for them to taste the delights of a night game in the Orange Bowl. Just to watch them walk across the parking lot past Hurricane fans would be worth the price of admission.

In the course of all this change something wonderful has happened to the ACC. Rising from a small, parochial league the ACC today is not just America’s premier basketball conference, it is arguably the nation’s top baseball conference as well, and few will dispute the league’s top tier football programs are as fearsome as any in the country. Not only has ACC football become a national contender, but now for the first time football brings more revenue to the Conference than basketball.

There are plenty of ACC fans who are rightly proud of our conference’s strength in all collegiate sports, great and small. However, there are plenty of others who do not like the way things are now and yearn for the way things used to be. And they blame FSU for the coarse intrusion of football and for the eclipse of their cherished basketball culture.

Like my Rex, they just don’t like us. And from time to time, we have to expect to get bit.