Much of the focus surrounding the conference moves has focused squarely on Texas A&M and what that move will mean for swimming in the Big 12. But today, the conference realignment opened a new front with the announcement that Pittsburgh and Syracuse would be applying for admission to the ACC. According to this blog from CBSSports.com, there is “no scenario” in which a University president would apply to a conference and not have his school accepted.
The buyout fee is a relatively-cheap $5 million, though the Big East does require 27-months of notice, which implies that barring a total collapse of that conference, this move wouldn’t happen before the fall of 2014.
So what does this means for swimming? Directly, not much. Hoops fans are salivating at the thought of having UNC, Duke, Pitt, and Syracuse, four of the country’s most storied basketball programs, all in the same conference. But in swimming, not much changes.
Syracuse closed out the final chapter of its swim program at the Big East Championships last year, and doesn’t seem likely to revive the program anytime soon.
Pittsburgh is an above-average program in the Big East (which is the weakest of the Big 6 programs in terms of swimming), with their men’s team placing 3rd in the conference last year and their women’s placing 5th. They would serve as a replacement for the soon-to-be-retired Clemson programs (though women’s diving will survive) to bring the conference back to 10 swimming and 11 diving programs on both sides.
The two best returning swimmers on this year’s Pitt team are Ben Solari and backstroker Adam Maczewski, though both will likely be graduated by the time the move happens. Neither the men’s nor the women’s teams qualified any swimmers or divers for the NCAA Championships last year. Though the men have Maczewski, who was a 47.5 in the 100 back last year and has the potential to get there. Both the Pitt men and women also have decent diving programs.
But the peripheral, indirect ramifications of this are more significant. First of all, Pitt has pretty good facilities at their Trees Pool. The facility that was recently renovated is a 50-meter x 25-yard tank with both springboard and platform diving apparatus. As one of the primary facilities in talent-rich Pennsylvania (think Hershey, Germantown, Parkland Aquatic Club), if they join the higher-level ACC conference, they have every piece to really improve their recruiting.
Pittsburgh's Trees Pool, opened in 1962, has hosted 16 Big East Championships, including in 2010.
The domino effect here becomes even bigger. The ACC seems dead-set on surviving all of the shifts, as is evidenced by the fact that their University presidents unanimously voted to raise the buyout fee to $20-million. Had those programs been anticipating invitations to the SEC, as some have speculated, they would have been unlikely to vote to raise the buyout.
If the Big East is on its way to demise, then West Virginia – with a pretty good men’s swim team – seems destined to join the SEC to counter the addition of Texas A&M. If the Big East continues to fall, the next big prize from an overall perspective is probably Louisville, which also happens to be the conference’s best swimming program. Next up would be Notre Dame (though they bring all of the big sports except for football, where they’re an independent) who also happens to be the 2nd-best swimming program. TCU becomes an interesting case, because they haven’t even begun Big East competition yet and might already be looking for a new home (could become an obvious savior for the Big 12?)
This might even go so far as to reach into the Big 12 and pull it apart as well. The ACC is clearly in expansion mode, and they might look to become the first of the prophecied “super conferences” and snatch up some combination of the leftovers of the Big 12 – perhaps Texas and Oklahoma (who meet to vote on their university’s future Monday) could be targets. This would answer the question of who, exactly, Texas expects to compete against in swimming.
Then, perhaps Notre Dame (from the failed Big East) and Missouri (from the failed Big 12) go to the Big Ten, which would leave the Pac-12 scrambling to find more teams as it becomes even more geographically isolated (Texas Tech sans swimming; Boise State with a women’s program; Air Force with both men’s and women’s programs; and BYU with both men’s and women’s programs seem like the logical targets).
Where is all of this going to stop, and who is going to go where? We can’t make any better than educated guesses at this point, but it seems as though the swimming landscape is going to be undergoing meaningful changes in the next 12 months. I think that we’re closer than might have been expected to the four-conference system. We really don’t know if this is going to end up as a postiive or a negative for the smaller, Olympic sports like swimming (Chris Ritter has an opinion and a concern), but in the interim it’s definitely exciting.