Oct. 27, 2003

The reality of ACC expansion at long last registered on my generally disinterested brain this weekend when we rolled out of Clemson, taking the back roads through Pendleton and working northeastward toward the airport in Greenville. The Tar Heels and Tigers might not play football again until 2006 and we might not visit this curious little burg in the Upstate for four more years. And I really think that stinks.

With the inclusion of Virginia Tech, Miami and Boston College to the league, the 12 members will be split into two divisions. Each school will play the others in its division each year in football. In addition, there will be some cross-division rivalries protected for historical purposes; one of those will be the Carolina-State game.

So soon the Tar Heels will have six annual ACC games against State, Duke, Virginia, Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech and Miami. They will continue to have three non-league games. That leaves two more ACC games to be rotated among Maryland, Clemson, Wake Forest, Florida State and Boston College (depending on when the Eagles actually begin competition in the league).

Given that I have witnessed in person every Carolina-Clemson game since 1974--with one exception--a football season without the annual grudge match against the Tigers seems unthinkable.

Growing up in Western North Carolina, it was impossible to miss the big orange shadow. Clemson was just over an hour from Hendersonville, while Chapel Hill at the time was a good five-hour drive, pre-Interstate 40. It was easier to find The Frank Howard Show on TV on Sundays than The Bill Dooley Show. I even saw my first college football game at Clemson--that on a rainy day in 1968 when the Tigers bounced the Heels, 24-14.

A handful of high-school buddies attended Clemson, so my college days in the late-1970s included several blurry road-trips to Tigertown. Clemson was home to one of the true gentlemen in college athletics, the late Bob Bradley. The long-time Tiger sports information director dispensed Deep South witticisms over plates of fried catfish and always made young journalists feel twice as smart as they actually were.

And Carolina's biennial trip to Clemson wouldn't be complete without a visit to The Esso Club, the 1933 institution that once was a gas station/grocery store and now is Dixie's answer to Cheers.

That affection for Clemson was tempered with abhorrence when I learned my beloved Heels were losing football players to the "generosity" of coaches Charley Pell and Danny Ford. The Tigers served their NCAA sentence, of course, but not before winning a national title with their ill-gotten gain. I'll never forget an opinion piece in The Charlotte Observer in the early 1990s by an Observer staffer and Clemson graduate who wrote she'd rather have a cheatin' dog like Ford (adjectives mine) coaching the Tigers than a winner and straight-arrow like Ken Hatfield.

The Tar Heels and Tigers have staged some memorable competitions over the years--particularly in the early 1980s when Ford and Dick Crum were at each other's throats. I'll never forget the epic battle in 1981 in Chapel Hill, won by the Tigers 10-8 en route to their national crown ... or the "statement game" in 1993 in Chapel Hill, when the Heels dominated 24-0 and Mack Brown ended 12 years of Tiger victories ... or the surgeon-like precision with which the Heels dissected the Tigers in Death Valley in 2001, a 38-3 joyfest termed by coach John Bunting as close to a "perfect" game as he'd ever witnessed.

So for now this series is put on suspension. Virginia Tech and Miami are on the schedule for 2004, Clemson most likely off. That's going to take some getting used to.