![]() Nobody had ever heard of a super conference before." There were several people who understood the vision and were really excited, but they were outnumbered by those who were just terrified of something so radical. "But the presidents just couldn't get their arms around it. "It would have changed the face of college athletics," Hart told Street & Smith's Sports Business Journal in 2011. was also at the meeting representing East Carolina. "I remember the proposal being explored, but it was sort of left out there," Pastilong recalled.įormer Tennessee athletic director Dave Hart, Jr. In the spring of 1990, former WVU athletics director Ed Pastilong recalls going out to Dallas to sit in on Raycom's presentation. What it suggested was a conference consisting of 16 football-playing schools with either two eight-team or four four-team divisions, similar to what the ACC and Pac-12 were also discussing at the time. Raycom spent six months putting together the proposal, taking into consideration such things as alumni bases, regional rivalries and institutional compatibility. Raycom, the dominant television production company and syndicator at that time, pitched a massive configuration that would have morphed the Metro Conference and the Eastern football independents into one giant league encompassing more than a third of the television households in the country. West Virginia could have been part of a 16-team super conference that was proposed in 1990. Morgantown's inaccessibility and lack of an adequate airport was the reason the ACC gave for not inviting WVU into the new league. West Virginia and Virginia Tech were also hopeful of becoming members of the ACC a year later, but the league opted to add just the University of Virginia and limit its membership to eight schools. However, this configuration lasted only three years before Clemson, Maryland, North Carolina, North Carolina State, Wake Forest, Duke and South Carolina left to form the Atlantic Coast Conference in 1953. ![]() The Southern Conference was once a 17-member monstrosity that encompassed five different states and the District of Columbia when WVU was invited to join in 1950. ![]() The league added Colorado and Utah in 2011. Hamilton was left with only a conference of five schools, which grew to eight a decade later when Washington State, Oregon and Oregon State joined and then to 10 when Arizona and Arizona State became members in 1978. Hamilton used his connections with the military to get the service academies interested, but someone in the Pentagon was against it and once the service academies backed out, Hamilton's plan collapsed. "It was going to be a monster football league," former Penn athletic director Jerry Ford once told Dunnavant. Hamilton, who commanded the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise during World War II, reasoned that jet air travel had shrunk the country to the point where geography was no longer an inhibiting factor to conference affiliation. This super conference could have also potentially included Pitt and West Virginia. He encouraged those from USC, UCLA, Washington, Stanford and California to think big and pursue a configuration that included the three service academies, Notre Dame, Penn, Penn State, Duke, Georgia Tech and others. ![]() What Hamilton proposed in the late 1950s, according to Keith Dunnavant in his 2004 book The Fifty-Year Seduction, was a super conference spanning the entire country and including some of the biggest names in college football at the time. In 1959, Hamilton, formerly Pitt's head football coach and athletic director, took on the responsibility of reassembling the league, which eventually came to be known as the Pacific-8 Conference. When jet travel became common in the late 1950s, Admiral Tom Hamilton once proposed something similar for the remnants of the Pacific Coast Conference, which had endured an ugly breakup in 1958. That means USC and UCLA will be making cross-country trips to such places as Piscataway, New Jersey, State College, Pennsylvania, Columbus, Ohio, and East Lansing, Michigan. Of course, I'm talking about the blockbuster announcement last week that longtime Pac-12 Conference stalwarts USC and UCLA plan to join the Big Ten Conference as early as 2024. – Having a collegiate sports conference spanning one side of the country to the other might sound a little strange, but it's far from being a novel concept. ![]()
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