The ACC can't really blame anyone else for this, since they were the ones who raided the Big East, caught a horrendous case of mediocrity, and then failed to win more than a single game in the current BCS arrangement before being thrown out of the power structure for being, well, themselves. The ACC is at heart a basketball conference, and we refuse to judge them for their personal choices, no matter how weird and aberrant to the natural order they may be, or how harshly they'll be judged by the Red God for arriving in the afterlife wearing squeaky shoes on the green, well-lined fescue of Valhalla.

(SPOILER: your punishment will be watching Boston College play Wake Forest forever. Oh, and you know that shit's in BC, not Wake.)

So suddenly unstable is the ACC that the Big 12 isn't even really hiding ACC members' overtures at this point.

According to Chris Level, who is the publisher of RedRaiderSports.com and a co-host of a radio show on 104.3 FM in Lubbock; he Tweeted that Del Conte said that the once dead Big 12 "now has schools like Florida State, Clemson and Miami trying to get in."

There is this tendency towards making this something someone constructed, something that some genius saw happening ahead of everyone else, countered, and then spun to their advantage. This scene in a movie probably happens in a long closeup of someone looking an object that unlocks the mystery for them, and is then followed by a hurried rush down a corridor to somewhere where the plan begins.

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PLANS ARE NICE.

Important: he never said a loss "on the football field." Who just burned your house down, Mark Richt? Where will you sleep noww--and that's not your house. Well, it scorched your azaleas, and you just remember that, okay? You remember the bastard who scorched your precious landscaping. [peels out in Charlie Weis' old golf cart] (via, via)

NO ONE IS SAFE. Chip Brown will now just bleed out one insane rumor at a time until realignment happens, both because he has interesting sources, and also because subscriptions don't sell themselves, sir. Of note in the probable insanity column today: Georgia Tech has reached out to the Big 12 now that the ACC is taking on water. This is totally plausible, unlike the improbable insanity of the ACC allegedly turning down overtures of Texas, Texas Tech, Oklahoma, and Oklahoma State. You didn't read this, John Swofford cannot possibly be that stupid, and there's no way a pilot would let their son fly a commercial plane full of passengers.

RIP, SHORTLIVED DESCRIPTOR "PERSASTRONG." Dan Persa, one in a long line of crafty, overachieving Northwestern quarterbacks, may not lay again after doctors determined he would need a second surgery on his extremely borked Achilles tendon. We scarcely knew ye, Persastrong.com.

SO NO ONE REALLY KNOWS WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED AT MONTANA. Though we would love to see a football coach at a major FBS school attempt to "contextualize" a player biting a woman by showing pictures of said bite to reporters, as Robin Pflugrad did in MIssoula.

THERE WAS NOTHING AVERAGE ABOUT PORK CHOP WOMACK. Billy put together a list of the SEC's most average players, and we strenuously object to the inclusion of anyone named after a delicious cut of meat.

PLEASE DON'T NEGLECT THE SUNBEAST. The Sun Belt will announce expansion today, possibly expanding the empire to include beautiful Eagle Creek.

ETC: Bill Murray, just rappin' about tangelos. When Adam Jacobi goes out with his "friends," he means all of them, even the parrot. NFL players really don't give two shits if you're gay or not as long as you just please for the love of god block that horrible man across from you, okay?

YOU'RE LOOKING LIVE. At your graduation.

[/puts finger to side of nose]

I'm happy to be here today in beautiful Columbus, Ohio. If you are not Columbus, Ohio, then you should be, because it is a great town. A lively town. I once won a live boy in an all-night pinochle match there. Jim Tressel hated to lose him, but he's been a fine stable boy for me for five years. Craig Krenzel, I owe you so much more than five years of back pay. i owe you gratitude.

Someday I'll get your family out of Haiti, Craig. I promise. I'm the one who sent them there, and I'll be the one who gets them back.

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THIS LITTLE MAN MAKES MONSTERS. Lifting, vomiting, running, vomiting, more lifting, more vomiting: this is the routine for your poet-warriors for the next three months, and their Sherpa to the pinnacle of Pain Mountain will be the strength coach. Strength coaches are all the same. They carry the traps of someone who still does power cleans because he likes the yoke they give him. They all rise obscenely early, are never seen eating, and usually buoy their natural enthusiasm with some devilish stimulant combo. (4% of Red Bull's net value is attributable to consumption by strength coaches. 2% belongs to Dana Holgorsen.)

They are always hoarse, and always yelling anyway. Few personify the type better than Scott Cochran of Alabama, the tiny man who in his word "makes monsters."

Just record the whole thing and blast it when you lift in your backyard with the concrete weights covered by plastic. You know the ones.

IN MEMORIAM: Coach Bill Stewart is remembered best by those who knew him in the Shotgun Throwdown. As weird as his exit from WVU was, it's impossible to remember Stewart as anything else than a genuinely nice man thrown into a very weird situation called "the state of West Virginia." RIP.

FUNNY YOU CAN'T GET THAT DOG BACK ON THE LEASH EH? The ACC is not the Big East, but we're with Blutarsky is scoffing at the notion that the conference wouldn't be hurt by the Big Four effectively breaking off and writing their own checks. But yeah, dudes with suits and ties say things are okay, and they usually do.

Y U SO CHEAP, B1G? Your reminder that only seven of the Big Ten's current stadiums have lights, because night time is when the corn demons come out.

NOTRE DAME IS IMPROVING NO REALLY THERE ARE NUMBERS AND EVERYTHING. We hope Notre Dame fans are patient, and considering some of them are still working on the Julian calendar--damn you, Pope Gregory XIII!--they might be exactly three days more patient. Because Notre Dame really is improving, albeit slowly, and with the horrors of conference realignment and Red Zone Tommy Rees swirling around them.

TAKING REQUESTS. If Dan Mullen is going to play Stairway to Heaven on the piano, then Holly has requests. We will request "Brick" by Ben Folds Five, and then immediately ask him to stop with tears in our eyes. "We're sorry to get so emotional. That reminds us of the time our girlfriend got a 2011 BCS Title Game."