Wonder how the ACC picked their bowl games?

From ESPN Insider:

For a glimpse into the wild, wacky, what-the-deuce world of bowl team selections, you needn't look any further than the ACC. On Sunday afternoon, a six-pack of bowl selection committees with ACC tie-ins sat down in six cities and proceeded to have a WWE-style bunkhouse stampede to decide who got whom. And like pro wrestling, few left the cage without at least getting their feelings hurt.

I talked to two ACC-affiliated bowl officials Sunday night. One described the afternoon's cross-bowl talks as "more tense than my divorce proceedings." Another said of the day: "I've had more fun passing kidney stones."

How did it all go down? Stick with me here; it's worth it. But you might want to have some Tylenol on hand.

On Saturday night, the ACC championship game was played in Tampa, Fla., with a BCS bowl berth on the line. The Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets outlasted the Clemson Tigers in a track meet of a game, winning 39-34, so they earned an automatic bid to the Orange Bowl (it will be played Jan. 5, and their opponent will be the Iowa Hawkeyes).

So, naturally, runner-up Clemson was the next team picked, right? Wrong.

Per the terms of the ACC bowl picking order, the Chick-fil-A (you may still call it Peach) Bowl had the next selection, which it already had made earlier in the week, extending an invite to the Virginia Tech Hokies. It was not a reach; the Hokies finished the season with a 6-2 conference record identical to Clemson's and posted a better overall record than the Tigers did, 9-3 versus 8-5. It also didn't hurt that Tech helped sell out the Georgia Dome's SEC-ACC opening-weekend game the past two seasons. The Hokies will face the Tennessee Volunteers on New Year's Eve.

So, naturally, Clemson was the next team picked, right? Wrong.

The Gator Bowl had the next selection, and this was where things got a little screwy. According to ACC bowl procedures, the Gator can pass on the ACC team with the best conference record, but if it does, it has to adhere to the "one-win rule," meaning it has to pick a team within one win of the team it passed up. So it passed on 6-2 Clemson for 4-4 Florida State.

Wait, what?

Turns out the Gator Bowl directors reworked their individual contract with the conference two years ago after being stuck with the ACC championship game runner-up less than a month after that same team lost the title game in that same stadium. It seems fans don't like making a return trip to the place where they just got their season ruined and hearts broken. (Go figure.) So the Gator Bowl had a clause put in that says it doesn't have to take the ACC title game runner-up more than once over a four-year period. It took Georgia Tech in '06 after the Yellow Jackets' loss to Wake Forest, so it wasn't obligated to take Clemson this year. The fight to have the four-year clause added became so tense that the Gator will ditch its ACC-Big East association in 2010 for an SEC-Big Ten alignment; this might explain why the Gator Bowl folks didn't mind ticking off everyone from the conference to their fellow bowl partners when they weaseled their way into landing home-state hero Bobby Bowden's final game with Florida State, a matchup with the other program he helped build, West Virginia.

So, naturally, Clemson was the next team picked, right? Wrong.

The Champs Sports Bowl in Orlando, Fla., passed on the Tigers because they just played the ACC title game in Tampa, only 85 miles away, and conventional bowl game wisdom says a team's fans, even those as notoriously loyal as Clemson's, won't make the same trip twice in a little more than three weeks' time. It instead took in-state hero Miami, which will face Wisconsin on Dec. 29.

So, naturally, Clemson was the next team picked, right? Right. Finally.

Nashville's Music City Bowl, apparently the first game actually bound by the one-win rule, ended up with the Tigers for a Dec. 28 matchup against the Kentucky Wildcats. That meant Clemson, which was 90 seconds from a multimillion-dollar BCS berth, ended up falling all the way to the ACC's fifth bowl game, and even that game didn't really want the Tigers. Seriously.

By rule, if the ACC championship game runner-up is available and has won at least eight games, the Music City Bowl has to select that team. So it did, forcing the bowl to break off an earlier handshake agreement with 8-4 North Carolina. The Tar Heels knew their humiliating loss to NC State in the regular-season finale had cost them a trip to a Florida bowl, but they were thrilled about the chance to go to Nashville to face Kentucky or perhaps even next-door neighbor South Carolina. But because of the Gator Bowl's Crazy Ivan, the Heels had to wave goodbye to Music City.

Where will they play? In Charlotte's Meineke Car Care Bowl on Dec. 26, a two-and-a-half-hour bus ride Carolina made in 2004 and 2008. And in case you were wondering, San Francisco's Emerald Bowl was next, taking 8-4 Boston College, which also finished ahead of Florida State, to play USC, also on Dec. 26. Meanwhile, the ACC's last two tie-ins, the EagleBank and GMAC bowls, went looking outside the conference due to a lack of six-win eligible teams.

 

Not much excitement right now for ACC football. I wonder how many empty seats we'll see this year in some of these games?

 

I actually don't think they could have done much better in terms of selling tickets. Other than B.C., I think that every school will have big crowds with them.

 

Its not confusing if.....

...one looks at how teams travel, and if they've traveled to "said" destination recently. Other than UNC having to go back to Charlotte, all the rest of the teams in the ACC come out smelling like a "rose", pardon the pun.
BC gets a bigtime media chance facing USC, Va. Tech travels like a bunch of Gypsies so I guess they "earned" the opportunity by past results of the bottom line for bowls....$$$$$$$$.
Clemson deserves WAY better, but they;ve not been in the mix for awhile so it makes sense for the bowls to gamble and move the tigers to another place.
NCSU beat Pitt, how, well I don't know, but they did. Without the NCSU loss Pitt is in a bigtime spot, so they get rewarded to play UNC, another loser to NCSU.
Pitt might lay down from dissappointment having to play anybody in the tire bowl, but if they come to play, they'll beat UNC like a drum.

 

I'll take State in their game


Oh, wait


Well shit, guess I won't then.

 

what they didn't say was that Clemson was trying to talk their way down from music city bowl so they could play in charlotte.

 

Clemson/Pitt game would be a lot better than Pitt/UNC.

 

I can't imagine why Clemson wouldn't think that they're fans would be dying to drive to Nashville to have a rematch of the bowl game (Clemson lost) from 2 years ago after losing the last 2 weeks of the year on the road.

Gator Bowl sold out in less than 2 hours. That's impressive.

 

I'm not sold on Pitt, I think Carolina's D will be able to shut down their offensive.

I'm sure the Car Care Bowl is glad to have UNC and they will probably draw a solid crowd, but a Music City Bowl matchup between North and South Carolina would have been interesting.

 

UNC's defense will do good for the first half. But the UNC offense will be 3 and out so much that the UNC defense will get tired from being on the field so much.