Pitt to honor waiting period for Atlantic Coast Conference

No official date has been set for Pitt and Syracuse’s move to the Atlantic Coast Conference,… No official date has been set for Pitt and Syracuse’s move to the Atlantic Coast Conference, but ACC Commissioner John Swofford said in a teleconference Sunday morning that the ACC would respect the 27-month waiting period for switching conferences required by the Big East.

That means it would be more than two years before the Panthers and Orange actually play in the ACC.

“We will see if the 27-month waiting period serves everyone’s best interest,” Pitt Chancellor Mark Nordenberg said in the teleconference.

Pitt and Syracuse received an invitation to join the the Atlantic Coast Conference after both schools submitted letters of recommendation, a news release from the ACC said this morning. Both schools were unanimously accepted.

Swofford said no decision has been made on the make up of new divisions in the conference. He added that the addition of Syracuse and Pitt will make the ACC range along the entire east coast.

The two teams were among the first to join the Big East Conference, Syracuse was a founding member and Pitt joined in 1982, three years after the conference formed.

Swofford said in the teleconference that a “double-digit” number of schools reached out to the ACC for possible admission before Pitt and Syracuse officially applied.

Because both Pitt and Syracuse criticized Boston College, Miami and Virginia Tech when they moved from the Big East to the ACC in 2003, some view this decision as a betrayal of the Big East and Big East conference commissioner John Marinatto said in a statement he was “very disappointed” by the news.