The ACC doesn't need Maryland. As for their fanbase I have friends in the Washington, Baltimore and the Eastern Shore area who very much miss their ACC rivalries. My friend who has a law firm in the Baltimore area said Title IX was the number 1 financial drain and deciding factor for the B10 invite. This guy loves Maryland football.
Look, the ACC needs Maryland trust me. The media coverage aroudn D.C. has decidely shifted to the Big Ten.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/?nid=menu_nav_sports
When you go to the washington post there are links to: Redskins, Nationals, Capitals, Wizards, D.C. United, Maryland (UMD), and AllMetSports (local high school).
They rarely cover UVA or VT, and they do as many piece on them as they do PSU. Sure Duke and UNC are national draws, but the day to day coverage is all Maryland. It's not good for the ACC to lose the Baltimore and Washington D.C. market. Ohio State and Michigan have taken their place. With Maryland being better in basketball again, it really has pushed out the Georgetown, Duke and UNC as the regulars.
As far as our old rivalries, yes I miss them, I wish the ACC was back to a 8 team league. Without FSU, where we all played each other in football and played each other twice in basketball and I could drive to all the games. However, that ACC died a long time ago. That's like wanting to go back to your high school sweet heart 30 years later, thinking it will be the same as it used to be.
More than 1/2 of the ACC now are teams that were NOT part of the original ACC. The ACC is more Big East than it is the ACC i knew.
FSU, Notre Dame, Louisville, Pitt, Syracuse, Miami, Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech, and Virginia were all added after the ACC was formed. That is 9 out of 15 teams that were not there in 1953 out of the original Maryland, Clemson, Duke, Wake, NC State, UNC, and South Carolina.
Now for people that were born yesterday, this might not mean much. But before games Maryland has always played "The battle hymn of the Republic" while the other schools played "Dixie". We were the outlier and a lot of schools held it against us that we sided with the North in the Civil war even though we were a southern state. We held slaves the entire war and even 3 years after the war ended until 1867. Maryland schools were segregated until the 1960s. We held slaves, but we weren't traitors. Can't escape who you are and what you were, but Maryland has never really belonged in the ACC completely. So for that we got screwed by the Carolina mafia who had the voting block to do what it wanted. UVA(always votes with UNC)/UNC/Duke/Wake/NC State always would screw MD, Clemson and South Carolina every chance they got. The tournament was almost always in North Carolina. They raised academic standards just to screw South Carolina and Maryland leading to South Carolina leaving and the demise of our football in the 1960's. The bias towards the Carolina schools was ridiculous.
So in conclusion we may be a outlier and we have some things in common with the other B1G schools, like we had some things in common with the ACC. The difference is the B1G treats us 10 times better. Maryland fans don't travel that much and we are pretty well off and traveling to PSU, RU, OSU, Michigan and Indiana is not hard at all for those who want to. There is no way the FANS would ever go back to the ACC, now seeing how a conference fairly treats its members and the admin is not going back to 27 million a year when we will see like 50.
