Wow, VMI and Gast. We gave up any type of beneficial rivalry and ACC thanked us by shafting us out of an avg 35k home game. It's about a $2M mistake. The ND game was already locked in & they're not a conference opponent. Now if you tell me we ditched Clemp and picked up 2 extra home & 2 away games against ND, not the Chik fila kick off crap home game where we only get a small portion of a reduced sized stadium but a real Mbenz home game, well that's a different story.
I would argue that what GT needs to do is win. Start winning 8-11 games every year and GT will be the team that people come to the stadium to see. It won't be 15k GT fans and 40k mutt fans after Thanksgiving.
Clemson doesn't look good this year. Dabo was ripping into a teenage caller to his radio show tonight. Are their fans going to travel when they are just an average team? When the mutts slow down or Kirby unSmart is fired for some scandal are their fans still going to pay lots of money to go to that game at BDS? I think something that people overlook a lot is that teams that are good today aren't necessarily going to be good in a few years. I am not predicting it, but it is possible that Clemson is currently on a downslide to an average team. In the SEC it used to be that the SEC West played to decide who got the opportunity to lose to Tennessee or Florida or occasionally the mutts. Then it because who in the East got the opportunity to lose to Alabama, LSU, or occasionally Auburn. The last couple of years it was who gets to lose to the mutts, but they appear to be beatable this year.
Who will be the top team in the ACC in three years? I would say it is likely to be FSU, but I have no real idea what will happen there. If Mike Norvell leaves, they might go through another rough patch. Clemson could possibly already be an average team for the long term. Mack Brown can't be at UNC much longer. Miami has been a dumpster fire with top notch talent for a long time. We have no idea who will be good and relevant, and who will be bad. If you had told people two years ago that GT would be travelling to Clemson late in the season needing a win to be able to go to a bowl game, people would have automatically said to just forget about a bowl game. If GT is 4-5 and needs to beat Clemson and Syracuse to make a bowl this year, people will probably say it is about even odds. You can't schedule seven years of games and have any certainty at all how the schedule will work out from a relevancy and attendance standpoint.