SPORTS August 11, 2003 Issue

US college football—with a difference

By Eric Nager

Visit Any Newsstand, and you will see sports magazines touting their preview issues for the upcoming US college football season. There are colorful articles and predictions as to which teams will win, along with the ever-present Top Ten rankings.

In the US, cynics are lamenting the fact that college football has turned into a big-money business, with little regard for the athletes' academic careers. Fox example, the University of Miami and Virginia Tech have just paid $1 million each to leap, in all sports, from the Big East Conference to the Atlantic Coast Conference, for the purpose of seting up a lucrative football championship game within the Atlantic Coast Conference.

But there's more to that story. It was recently announced that the Miami and Virginia Tech basketball teams would be allowed to participate in the season-ending Big East tournament next March. There will be no retaliation from the conference from which their schools are departing, which otherwise would have meant that innocent players would miss an opportunity to play for a championship.