Two self-promotion items, if you will allow us to indulge:
(1) After the embarrassment perpetrated on the ACC by Boston College as evidenced in the picture above, it was announced yesterday that the ACC Football Championship will move to Tampa and Charlotte over the next four years.
Now that the announcement is official, please allow me to turn your attention to this entry that we wrote a month earlier. In the entry we predict:
We’ll give you a little prediction and you can come back and judge us on it later – Tampa will get the 2008 game and Charlotte will get the 2009 and 2010 game
I feel pretty good about ‘missing’ that by one year (because we thought only three years were being bid).
Personally, I think that Tampa will be marginally better than Jacksonville because – contrary to popular belief – the issue of the distance between the schools and the locale is not the only issue that impairs attendance. It may the primary issue; but it is not the only issue.
First, Jacksonville sucks. It just sucks. It isn’t that fun of a place to viist. Jacksonville It is grossly dispersed and spread out and the only centralized gathering spot is a cheesey area called “The Landing”, which as a 25 to 30 minute drive from Jacksonville Beach where many fans choose to stay while the ‘fat cats’ are typically an hour outside of town at Jeckyll and Amelia Island. Tampa is a significantly better place to visit than Jacksonville based on almost every major category of interest – nightlife, visual appearance, weather, convenience, restaurants, etc.
Second, ACC fans have ‘Jacksonville fatigue’ because of the Gator Bowl. Its not that the Gator Bowl is necessarily a bad bowl…but, fans already know that they probably are going to have some reason to visit Jacksonville (if they haven’t already been to the Gator recently). Tampa is fresh and new to the conference and since no Outback Bowl exists, everyone knows that this may be their only chance to hit the town.
In short, Tampa is a better locale for the game than Jacksonville. But, that obviously is not a ringing endorsement for major success.
For more on this topic, you will enjoy this blog entry that discusses the merits of holding the game on campus instead of at a neutral site.
(2) It has been reported over the last week that former UCLA Head Coach, Karl Dorrell is a candidate for the job at Duke (that nobody wants). To many people Dorrell’s name came out of nowhere.
But, not to SFN readers.
A good 3 or 4 days before Dorrell’s name surfaced publicly our own BJD was sharing his thoughts that Duke should go after a former head coach who showed potential but might have been put into a job that was a little too big a little too early. He cited Dorrell by name as an excellent candidate for the Duke job.
If Joe Alleva had been listening earlier, he might not have needed to have gone this route.
