The road to the ACC’s championship game is the one less traveled

I recently came across the Atlantic Coast Conference’s Web site promoting its annual football championship game and couldn’t help but chuckle. The site and campaign slogan is “Road to Tampa Bay.”

It’s pretty ironic considering very few people actually take to the streets to attend this title game.

After the league began expansion in 2004, the first ACC championship game came in 2005 in Jacksonville, Fla., at Alltel Stadium. After three miserably attended games there, the powers that be moved to Tampa’s Raymond James Stadium, home of the Buccaneers.

The new venue hosted the 2008 event, which saw Virginia Tech top Boston College 30-12 in front of 27,360 people.

They should have piled into Duke’s Wallace Wade Stadium for a bigger effect.

The two teams got rid of only 5,000 of their allotted 20,000 tickets, and they were letting people in for free before the start of the game.

Obviously, the move was a disaster and resulted in the worst-attended ACC title game yet.

The league is under contract with Tampa for one more season before moving the game to Charlotte’s Bank of America Stadium, and there are reasons why the league is screaming for attention.

For starters, you can thank expansion, which is the same reason the game was invented in the first place.

While the addition of Virginia Tech, Miami and Boston College has really strengthened the ACC, they’re not putting fannies in the seats at the championship game.

The Hokies have played in the title tilt three out of the four years and have a pretty solid chance of returning this season. Boston College has met Virginia Tech in the last two contests.

A quick look a Mapquest tells you all you need to know about those folks getting to Florida.

Boston is a cool 1,350-mile drive to “The Big Guava” that takes nearly a whole day. The road to Tampa for Hokie Nation consists of a 12-hour road trip.

And drawing local fans that pull for neither squad hasn’t made much sense. The University of South Florida of the Big East calls Tampa home, but the closest big-name school is the Florida Gators, an SEC power.

Also, Virginia Tech and Boston College aren’t “traditional” ACC powers. Wake Forest, Georgia Tech and Florida State are the only other schools to be involved in the event.

Look, Tampa-St. Petersburg is a great area and Raymond James is a terrific venue. I was able to spend a week there at the last Outback Bowl. But, the league has to realize that Florida is just too far removed from the rest of the league.

It doesn’t make sense to have a prime-time championship game with empty seats serving as the backdrop. That’s just bad for the league’s image.

Ultimately, the move to Charlotte the following two seasons should draw much more interest — especially if a Tobacco Road team makes the tilt — and hopefully the Sunshine State experiment is over.

Until then, however, that road to Tampa will be a lot less traveled.