ACC CHAMPIONSHIP NEEDS TO MAKE CHANGES

If you’re a Boston College fan, you can’t be happy with the way your team got whipped by Virginia Tech today in the ACC Championship Game.Fortunately, not many Boston College fans bothered to make the trip. And neither did many Virginia Tech fans. Raymond James Stadium had tens of thousands of empty seats, and the biggest understatement of the day was the headline in this morning’s St. Petersburg Times, which read, “ACC Championship Game likely won’t feature a full house."At one point, the TV cameras showed a father and son all by themselves, surrounded by empty seats, and the announcers cracked jokes about how easy it would be for them to find better seats if they wanted to. I’m sure the ACC honchos -- who dreamed of Florida State-Miami battles with national title implications when they expanded the conference and began having a title game -- weren’t laughing.Our friend Todd Wright of Sporting News Radio pointed out that the 2006 and 2007 ACC championship games were also plagued by woeful attendance, and that ACC schools (with the exception of Clemson) just don’t have the kinds of rabid fan bases who are going to travel to see them play in a conference championship game. Attendance will always be a problem for the ACC championship in Tampa and will continue to be a problem in 2010, when the game moves to Charlotte.The solution, then, is to start awarding home-field advantage to the team with the best record in the conference. Yes, there are logistical problems with not knowing the site of the conference championship game until, potentially, the week before it’s played. But there’s a much bigger problem with a half-empty house for the conference championship game, which makes the ACC look like a bush league.