ACC-SEC football partnership in the works?

CBS Sports had a brief, albeit interesting, look at a potential ACC-SEC partnership in college football. The idea is that with each conference keeping eight-game league schedules, a partnership of sorts could be created between the two entities.

This is actually something that's come up on the site before, but I haven't really given it a ton of thought. Some of the more southern ACC schools like Florida State, Miami, Georgia Tech, and Clemson could find some pretty intriguing matchups. Some, such as Florida State-Florida and Georgia Tech-Georgia, already have games between each other.

The ACC is growing stronger, in particular with the emergence of the Seminoles as a national power again. But while a game between the two conferences would make sense for some, on the surface, schools like Pitt really have little to gain here other than the prospect of merely playing a school from the top conference in college football for the fun of it. A game against a team like Tennessee or Arkansas really makes little sense when you think about it and is similar to what the Panthers are doing with Oklahoma State in a few years. It's a nice game in terms of a quality opponent, but not much more than that, really.

There is one advantage, though, for the the Panthers and other northern programs with no real link to the SEC - recruiting. At one point, Pitt (most notably, Dave Wannstedt) had success going into Florida to land players. As I wrote in a recent look at recruiting, that pipeline has dried up, starting with the tail end of Wannstedt's career at Pitt. With the Gators already occupied with Florida State, it's unlikely they'd find room for Pitt so the Panthers couldn't get back into the state via the SEC.

In addition, I'm not even certain how much one game against an SEC school would mean in terms of recruiting. But if the Panthers had a chance to play an annual game against one of those programs, it might slowly open up some doors to recruiting a little more in the south.

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