ACC Football should move kickoff event away from North Carolina

ACC Football will kick off the 2019 season this week with the annual meeting of coaches and players with the media in the same, tired old state as always.

This week, the 14 programs that make up the ACC football world will each send their head coach and two players for the annual media event over a two day period – meaning folks like FSU Seminoles head coach Willie Taggart, wide receiver Tamorrion Terry and defensive tackle Marvin Wilson will get to answer the same tired questions they have all summer.

So, going along with that theme, the folks that run the world that is ACC football decided to once again hold their annual event – you guessed it, where else but in the state of North Carolina where those who run the conference as a whole seem to think is the only state that generally exist at all.

Now, there are going to be those who don’t get that the last part was somewhat cynical – but it’s also somewhat truthful and has been the case since the start of the decade when the ACC football championship game was moved to Charlotte.

Florida State Seminoles Football

I get the idea that, geographically, Charlotte and the Tar Heel State as a whole are the closest big areas that are somewhat in the middle of the conference’s schools – a conference that literally runs from the commonwealth of Massachusetts and western New York all the way to south of the city of Miami and west near Chicago for most sports.

That is the disturbing part for those who don’t live in the state of North Carolina: the hypocrisy about selling the ACC football world, and the conference as a whole, as set to take over the entire eastern half of the United States but seemingly doing everything in the same locations – particularly the state of North Carolina.

I get it – the powers that be who run the ACC still think this is a basketball first league and are still obsessed with the Duke-UNC world without taking into account that one team in the last 29 seasons (Wake Forest in 2006) has won the conference championship despite a point where half the teams playing in it were from the state.

The Southeastern Conference, as much as I hate to give them credit, is smart about selling their product as their annual preseason media event moves around – this year being just outside Birmingham before moving to Atlanta in 2020 and Nashville the following year. That is what the ACC should be doing.

In a conference that brags about how you have giant media markets like New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Atlanta, Miami and many more, there is no reason to be wasting everyone’s time going to the same locations.

I get that the end of the season is staying in Charlotte for a while, but why does the start of the season have to be there as well?