'TobiasFunke said:
'Uruk-Hai said:
Even if MD/Duke was a rivalry on the scale of UNC/Duke, they'd still be leaving. Hoops ain't driving this, no matter what K tries to say. He knows it, too. I think he was just pissed right after losing a game and said something dumb.
I do it all the time.
No matter how you slice it, it was tone-deaf for a super-rich guy from a super-rich school to suggest that a public school that's had to cut a number of sports from its athletic program in the last year shouldn't have made a decision about athletics based on money. If you want to lament the loss of the rivalry as a casualty of the economic reality, I hear you. But he came across as judgmental, not sad. Just emotion after a loss, I suspect.

The public school had to make those cuts, and was forced into its situation, by chronic financial mismanagement. And as you may or may not be aware, Maryland made no attempt to stay in the ACC, or negotiate for a better deal: it just fled. So your arguments are completely flightless, even without the short-term problem that Maryland will face paying (some portion of) the exit fee, assuming that its frivolous litigation gets tossed.
Regardless, even for you, stretching Krrzyzewski saying that Maryland must not think it was that big of a rivalry if they were willing to abandon it (to become, quite possibly, a perennial also-ran and geographic outcast in the Big Ten) into an attack by a rich guy against the poor homeless people at UMD is just preposterously weak sauce. If Roy Williams had said this, you'd be applauding it ceaselessly and bemoaning the loss of ACC tradition.