I've got to get this off my chest! I know that I'm going to get blasted for this, but I think there is a large sense of false entitlement on this board...

As a Clemson alum, some of the things I read on here make me cringe (I know - I should just go back to my own message boards). I come here because I generally really enjoy the opinions on this board - or the ideas that y'all pass around. I've always felt Clemson and VT are quite similar in a lot of ways. I wish we played each other more in football, for sure. I've never had a problem with Tech fans (well - maybe a few in Charlotte 2011).

Here's what gets me: all this talk about kicking schools out of a conference is plain ludicrous and ignorant. The name I see most often is Wake Forest. Boston College comes in a close second. But in the same thread about the "deadweights" from yesterday, I saw a post about your own fan base's unwillingness to contribute to your athletic fund/booster club, etc. What is it - Golden Hokie, I believe was the one mentioned?

Let's just weigh some facts (we'll get BC out of the way first...I will agree that they bring very little to the table athletically, but the exposure the Southern schools in the league reap from just the affiliation with BC is tremendous). Do you really think when Clemson was struggling in the '90s and Clemsoning throughout the 2000's that anyone up north knew what a Clemson was? Nah. Then comes along BC, and while they may not have the presence of the Pats in Bahston, people undoubtedly tune into ESPN on any given Saturday at the bars, at home, etc. and can now recognize that iconic Tiger Paw helmet immediately. That means a lot to a school like Clemson from the middle of Nowhere, South Carolina with a student body of ~18,000 in a town of ~10,000. Clemson has always had a great local following (you can do the math - we averaged 84,000 in football last year and the student body plus the population only make up 1/3 of that). Clemson is an oddity, I will admit. We have the most successful booster club in the country (IPTAY), hell we laid the groundwork for the idea of athletic booster clubs.

Tech has a larger student body, the school has been around longer, a larger alumni base and the Blacksburg population alone is nearly 5x times that of Clemson, yet you have a difficult time corralling donors? That's not a weak-ACC-boring-schedule issue, that's an institutional issue. If your own "fan base" is not willing to support your athletics teams, you're right, the ACC Network will fail miserably, but it won't be just because of Wake and Boston College.

I can't for the life of me imagine why y'all love to bash Wake so much anyway. Their trophy case(s) are preeeeettttyyy nice for the smallest school in D-I athletics. A quick comparison between two athletic departments shouldn't offend anyone, right?

I've attached a short visual to help some of you understand. The old-school ACC schools are more loyal to each other than you think. VT is still "Big East" to us down here, to be honest. I wasn't around, but why was it that VT was passed over twice (three times if not for the Governor) when trying to gain admission to the ACC?

Like I said, I don't have a problem with anyone in the ACC - but numbers speak for themselves. Wake has a much more solid athletic history than VT (except in football, but every conference needs a "deadweight").

For an ACCN to work, we need filler, and that means BASEBALL, SOCCER, BASKETBALL, even GOLF. Olympic sports will of course be televised on whatever type network we get. We need to take a page out of the SEC's book (as awful as it sounds) and band together as a conference and MAKE OUR PRODUCT WORTH SOMETHING. Because, as The Voice says, "If you build it, he (John Skipper in this case) will come."

Sorry for the rant - er - truth, but I've also seen some of you knocking on how "whiny" us Clemson folk are to not get our way...I think the 60+ years we've dedicated to the ACC gives us (and even Wake Forest) a little more room to gripe than the new guys on the block.

Props to VPI for carrying the banner during the "dark period," but I think you have some problems at home to worry about before you start writing off your brethren. Be thankful for what you have, because a fragile ACC doesn't guarantee your bid to the SEC.

Also, if ND joins full-time as they are expected to do so in the near future, there's a guy in Winston-Salem by the name of Nathan O. Hatch that probably had more to do with getting the deal sealed than any other single person in the ACC.

**The sports I used in my crappy little table were just the largest sports that I could equally compare between SCHOOL A and SCHOOL B; neither school had Women's BBall info easily accessible, and I generously gave SCHOOL B 25 postseason appearances in Golf because that school is very good at hiding the number of postseason appearances in a bunch of nonsense**

#ACCLOVE ;)