Texas and ACC a Good Match?

Kristi Dosh argues that the Atlantic Coast Conference would come "the closest to giving Texas everything it wants and needs" in the areas of competitive balance, academics, and television contracts. Lately, I've been looking at possible realignment scenarios through the lens of travel distances, so why not examine Texas and the ACC that way?

The hub of the ACC arguably would be Raleigh-Durham (North Carolina) Airport. That's where you would fly into to play Duke, UNC, or NC State (Wake Forest, also in North Carolina, has airports closer to campus than Raleigh-Durham).

Looking at the Travel Math flight-distance website, we see that Austin, Texas is roughly 1,165 miles from Raleigh-Durham (1,170 miles from Raleigh, 1,159 from Durham). The outer reaches of the ACC are as or more distant from Austin: Miami (1,115 miles), Washington, DC (an approximation for trips to Maryland and Virginia; 1,318 miles), and Boston (1,696 miles). Tallahassee (home of Florida State, 804 miles), Atlanta (home of Georgia Tech, 819 miles), and Clemson, South Carolina (921 miles) would appear to be the shortest trips for Texas. Even though conferences' geographic names don't seem to mean much anymore, these distances reflect the fact that Texas is nowhere near the Atlantic Coast.

As I previously reported, the average distance from UT-Austin to its nine current mates in the Big 12 (including Texas A&M) is 446 miles, whereas the Longhorns' average travel distance would be 998 miles in a hypothetical 14-team Big 10 (including Notre Dame).

Presumably, Texas would need another school (or three) to join in on the move to the ACC, in order to give the Longhorns some shorter trips. I'm highly doubtful this could happen in reality, but Rice (a Conference USA school based in Houston) would be a good institution to accompany Texas to the ACC. After all, Rice has some academic similarities to the ACC's Duke and Wake Forest, plus the Owls have shown some degree of athletic success, winning the 2003 NCAA championship in baseball.

On the basis of academics, Vanderbilt (in Nashville, Tennessee) has always seemed to me a better fit with the ACC than its existing conference, the SEC; plus Texas and Vandy are "only" 753 miles apart. The SEC presumably wouldn't be lacking for schools to replace Vanderbilt. Throw in another elite academic school, New Orleans-based Tulane from C-USA (460 miles from Austin), and now you're getting somewhere!