Briefly, the new Big East officially begins shortly. That also means BC is leaving. Here’s a rather long but interesting article on the BC view of things. And yes they had been planning a long time to run to the ACC with Miami

Dave Hart Jr., Florida State’s AD and the group’s outgoing president, took advantage of the setting for a casual but business-oriented talk with Dave Braine, the AD at Georgia Tech. Along with former Clemson AD Bobby Robinson, Hart and Braine were the leaders in the slow but steady evolution of the Atlantic Coast Conference from a basketball-dominated league that also played football to a conference that wanted to be regarded among the elite in both sports.

So now, on this early summer evening, the talk was again of the ACC’s future and which schools could be added for it to go from a nine-team league to 12, which would mean a conference title game in football, and additional revenue.

Hart and Braine began to consider an expanded ACC with potential new members. Also among the group was Paul Dee, AD at the University of Miami, who had been studying the conference landscape for several years to see if the highly regarded Hurricane football program could move from the Big East for a bigger financial payoff. And there was Gene DeFilippo, the energetic AD at Boston College. DeFilippo’s agenda was more informational than anything else. He was also a close friend of Hart’s. The two bounced ideas off each other all the time.

This time, it was different.

BC, DeFilippo was told, was very much a player in what the ACC hoped would be a true super conference.

It was June 2000.

[Emphasis added.]