Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, July 22, 1990                   TAG: 9007220033
SECTION: SPORTS                    PAGE: C-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Bill Brill
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

MORE TALK OF EXPANSION BY THE ACC

Athletic directors, several of them returning from vacation sites, and athletic faculty chairmen will gather for what has been described as a fact-finding mission.

This is a way to describe "let's not get left out."

Only two months ago, in their spring meeting in Myrtle Beach, S.C., ACC leaders said expansion wasn't in their future.

Even then, they knew of Penn State's move to the Big Ten and Notre Dame's football contract with NBC.

But it was further talk of expansion by the Southeastern Conference, of the Metro's proposal of a 16-team super conference for football that should be renamed Raycom if it ever gets into focus, and rumors of changes out West that inspired the ACC gathering.

"We've got to make sure we don't get left out," said Virginia's Jim Copeland, one of those who will have to leave the beach to attend the meeting.

However, Copeland said he doesn't believe expansion will happen that swiftly, "not in the next five or six months the way everybody's been talking." The Metro has set an Oct. 15 deadline for its proposed members to announce their intentions.

The prevailing theory is that two schools - private institutions Duke and Wake Forest - oppose ACC expansion. In its history, the league never has had more than eight members.

Duke athletic director Tom Butters, who considers the league to be family, said, "I'm not opposed to looking at other alternatives. I don't want to be non-progressive."

Why would the ACC, with its tight geographic mix and its whopping basketball contracts, consider expansion? To help its mediocre football, which might get overwhelmed in the TV market if some of these proposals achieve fruition.

To which Butters responds, "If you had eight kids and things weren't going well, you're not going to adopt two new ones."

Even by taking in, say, Florida State and Miami, "You're not going to get instant credibility in football," Butters said.

"Georgia Tech [which replaced South Carolina in 1978, eight years after the Gamecocks defected] was a natural. We're not dealing with that now."

Butters wants to go slowly, pointing out that "it's farther to Miami than to Chicago" for six of the eight league schools.

What Butters wants to maintain, at all costs, is that "we continue to accommodate the values that set us apart from other conferences."

Still, he said, he agrees with further expansion discussion "because we have to be pro-active, rather than reactive."

Florida State, a kingpin in the Metro's 16-team football, 12-team basketball plan, is the focal point of any ACC expansion, especially since the Seminoles have expressed little interest in joining the SEC.

One Virginia alumnus, who lives in Florida and is dying to see Florida State and Miami become league members, insists a Florida State official told him the Seminoles have the needed six votes to get in the ACC. Copeland, who would have to represent one of those votes, says that isn't so. Not yet, anyway.

An ACC official said Florida State "would deliver the entire state [on television] in football, but I don't know if they would help in basketball."

Raycom's Ken Haines, who masterminded the Metro plan, points out that "bigger isn't necessarily better." Meaning, that just because there are more TV sets watching, that doesn't automatically translate into better ratings. Florida television could be important, but only if good ratings permitted profitable advertising.

Apparently, the ACC is considering these possibilities: Don't expand; take in Florida State only; ask both Florida State and Miami to join; or go the other direction and enroll Rutgers as well as Florida State (for the New York market).

While nothing official is likely to occur Wednesday, what the ACC eventually does could impact on the Metro. That package's success almost surely requires keeping Florida State and adding Miami and Syracuse. If the ACC picked off either or both Florida schools, and the Big Ten sought either Rutgers or Syracuse as its 12th member, the Metro plan would be in serious trouble.

While expansion talk continues unabated, the one certainty, Haines said, "is that nobody knows what is going to happen."