It’s been almost a half-century since the hit movie Jaws was released. It truly is one of Steven Spielberg’s timeless classics. For those who live under a rock, Jaws is a movie about a killer great white shark in a small beach town in Massachusetts.
Call me crazy, but when I think about what is going on in the ACC, it reminds me a little bit of the classic hit movie from 1975. Hear me out: the Atlantic Coast Conference would be the small beach town of Amity Island. But instead of one killer great white shark, the ACC is actually facing two of them with the SEC and Big Ten.
I say this because our own Pete Mundo said on the Heartland College Sports YouTube channel that “Right now, the sharks are circling. Brett Yormark, the athletic directors, the presidents, everybody is circling. They smell the blood in the water.”
Pete is right. The ACC appears to be shark food right now, and the Big 12 could potentially benefit from all this. What is important for the conference is that they keep the mindset of a shark.
In a recent interview with John Kurtz (who does great work, by the way), Kansas State athletic director Gene Taylor said, “As a conference, we need to stay aggressive, and that’s what Brett has done from the minute he got here.”
Taylor isn’t the only one who smells blood either. Recently College Football Media superstar Josh Pate also has said some interesting things about the ACC as well. Typically, Pate isn’t one to break news because he is usually on the reactionary side.
Last week, he had this to say about the ACC: “I put that gif out earlier this week because I have acquaintances that have contacts in the legal community,” Pate continued. “These are not contacts I would normally have, and I came about these contacts in a very interesting way, but I have them. They’re on the legal side of this, and they’re not necessarily on the football side, and I’ve gotten as much intel as they can give me through this thing earlier this week when they said, ‘Hey, get ready, it’s coming,’ I put the gif out.”
Pate finished his thoughts by discussing the situation’s timetable, saying, “I don’t know what the timeline is. I just know that this is the kind of person who’s not one for hyperbole. Frankly, I don’t think they care about the ramifications on the realignment side, but they know I do. The long and short of it is, I think that the reconfiguration of the ACC is pretty imminent.”
On top of all of this, the ACC currently has five active lawsuits on their hands. FSU against the ACC in Florida, Clemson against the ACC in South Carolina, the ACC against FSU in North Carolina, the ACC against Clemson in North Carolina and also the Florida Attorney General vs the ACC.
I may not be an expert on realignment, but I do smell blood in the water in regard to the ACC. There are just too many signs pointing to the ACC having a full-on meltdown.
While I do see the similarities between the movie Jaws and the ACC, there is one big difference. In the movie, Martin Brody (the police chief) and Matt Hooper (the oceanographer) are able to kill the shark and make it home safely. That isn’t how this situation is going to play out because, in reality, the ACC probably won’t be able to make it to shore safely without getting eaten.
