With a great deal of talk in local barbershops around the area centering around the University of Louisville’s athletic programs recently there has been plenty of topics that continue to come up, first and foremost, Louisville’s date with the Florida Gators in the Allstate Sugar Bowl January second in New Orleans.
Second, the men’s basketball team which has been steadily getting a lot of press since the beginning of the season, along with nearby rivals Kentucky and Indiana.
Any of the conversations regarding the Cards though seem to go back to their move to the ACC, which will go into effect in 2014.
This comes after many of the schools in the Big East have jumped ship to various other conferences, this information would have shocked many basketball fans just a few years ago, as the Big East stood as the most dominant conference in men’s and women’s basketball bar none.
It all started with West Virginia leaving the Big East, and has continued so much so that in the 2015 season DePaul, Georgetown, Louisville, Marquette, Notre Dame (only in Big East in football), Pittsburgh, Providence, Rutgers, Seton Hall, St. John’s, Syracuse, and Villanova (all currently in the conference) will be gone. In response the conference will add Central Florida, Houston, Memphis, Temple, Tulane, and Southern Methodist University.
Ironically all of the new teams coming to the Big East outside of Temple (currently in the MAC), come from Conference USA, where the Cards and a number of other schools came to the Big East from, further long time rival for the Cards, Memphis is arriving pretty much just in time for Louisville’s departure leaving many long time fans a little disappointed that the old Cards-Tigers rivalry won’t be starting back up like the “old days.”
None the less, the ACC will prove to be an interesting gamble for Louisville; the conference will be the Cards’ fourth athletic conference, who didn’t actually have an official conference until the 79-80 season when the school joined the Metro Conference.
The school would stay there until 1996, when the athletic department moved to the up and coming Conference USA, staying just shy of ten years in 2005 they found their next stop in the Big East. And that leads us to today, where the Cards currently are but not for too much longer.
The ACC in 2014 will feature these schools according to current information: Boston College, Clemson, Duke, Florida State, Georgia Institute of Technology, Miami (FL), North Carolina, North Carolina State, Virginia, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State, Wake Forest, Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Notre Dame, and Louisville.
What does this mean for the Cards? Time will tell.
Image courtesy of WCTI 12
