Just two days after the NCAA announced they were moving scheduled tournaments out of North Carolina in protest of the state’s anti-LGBTQ House Bill 2, the Atlantic Coast Conference—which includes North Carolina’s biggest Division I programs like Duke, UNC, NC State, and Wake Forest—announced it would also relocate several of their conference championships elsewhere.
“As members of the Atlantic Coast Conference, the ACC Council of Presidents reaffirmed our collective commitment to uphold the values of equality, diversity, inclusion and non-discrimination,” ACC officials said in a statement. “Every one of our 15 universities is strongly committed to these values and therefore, we will continue to host ACC Championships at campus sites. We believe North Carolina House Bill 2 is inconsistent with these values, and as a result, we will relocate all neutral site championships for the 2016–17 academic year.”
That includes the ACC football championship game, which has been played at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte since 2010. In February 2014, the conference announced a deal to keep the football championship game in Charlotte through 2019. Men’s basketball, the ACC’s other preeminent sport, held its conference tournament in Washington, D.C. in 2016 and is scheduled to hold the tournament at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn next March. It was last held in North Carolina in 2015.
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“It’s embarassing for our state, and it’s cost our state immense money and jobs,” said longtime Duke men’s basketball head coach Mike Krzyzewski. “But even more so, it’s hurt our image.” When asked on Tuesday if he hoped the ACC would follow the NCAA’s lead, he told Bloomberg Markets that he “hoped that they would.”
Duke Athletics Director Kevin White also issued a statement on Monday after the NCAA’s announcement, saying on behalf of the university that “we agree with the NCAA’s decision. Our position has been clear on this matter, which is that this legislation is discriminatory, troubling and embarrassing.”
This follows the NCAA’s decision to relocate all its 2016-17 championship games from North Carolina, which in turn followed the NBA’s decision to move the 2017 All-Star Game. You can whine about this all you like, but you can’t say you couldn’t have seen it coming. If Texas Republicans follow suit next year, they will have made the conscious decision to sacrifice these kind of events – and there’s more, of the non-sporting variety, where these came from – in the name of discrimination. Won’t that burnish our reputation as a “business-friendly” climate? The choice is theirs.
Looks like staying out of North Carolina was a good move. Who wants to subject themselves and their fans to racist, bigoted, violent people? I’m speaking of course, about the blm rioters in Charlotte. They hijacked trucks, probably kidnapped the drivers, assaulted cops, looted, and destroyed property. Who would want to go there and face that kind of violence?