Blue Devil Country's Shawn Krest and All Wolfpack's Brett Friedlander appeared on a podcast to discuss the new ACC schedule. Here, they talk about another John Swofford's master stroke, just before retirement.
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00:00 This was an explosion in my opinion, and I think that this will pump a lot of life into people who care about college sports,
00:07 people who care about the ACC and Notre Dame.
00:10 You know, what makes this even more of an explosion today is that everybody that I talked to over the last 48 hours
00:16 said that the ACC was going to punt on this and they were going to hold off until the NCAA council made its decision on fall championships next week.
00:23 The ACC went ahead and made this decision basically to force the SEC's hand,
00:28 because now the SEC basically has to do the same thing, because the ACC, going to a 10+1 format,
00:34 has left the door open for those rivalry games against Clemson, South Carolina, Georgia Georgia Tech,
00:39 Florida Florida State, Louisville Kentucky, and Oakland.
00:42 John Swofford is retiring next year, but he showed that he still has a lot of that ninja left in him with this announcement today.
00:49 Yeah, the way that they put the SEC in a tough spot, because the SEC had been leaking that they were going to do conference only,
00:56 and so now what the ACC has done is said, "You can do that if you want to.
00:59 If you don't want to play us in these rivalry games, then you can be the one to pull the plug on that. That's fine with us."
01:05 Since you brought up John Swofford, I'll go there.
01:08 15 years ago, a lot of people questioned whether or not Swofford was the guy that could keep the ACC together
01:14 and lead it into the next realm of college athletics.
01:18 Well, what's happened?
01:20 I think that this guy deserves an unbelievable amount of credit for what he's been able to do for this league
01:25 and give it the foundation and the stability that it has, and it's going to last in the future,
01:31 regardless of what Notre Dame does in football in 2021.
01:35 The one thing that I think that he should be remembered for more than anything is that he's the man who saved the ACC,
01:40 because instead of staying back and waiting and playing defense to try to keep Florida State and Clemson
01:46 and maybe even North Carolina and Duke from going to other conferences,
01:49 he went out and fired a preemptive strike and went out and basically gutted the Big East.
01:54 I mean, they call him Ninja for a reason. He's like a duck.
01:57 You never see how hard his legs are working underneath the water.
02:00 He just seems to be kind of floating along, and meanwhile, he's planning all this stuff,
02:04 and he's reshaping college football the way that he wants it to be, and he's been doing that for decades,
02:09 and no one ever sees it coming.
02:11 I mean, you can say that we never see it coming. That's fine, but the other commissioners don't seem to ever see it coming.
02:17 He takes them all by surprise.
02:19 I think the fact that he's able to do that and have no one aware of it is really one of the more impressive things about his leadership.
02:26 He's up there with David Stern as far as significant commissioners in sports, all of sports.