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► 1 ♦ Hint Several Eastern Schools Favor League-Splitting Idea Villanova, Boston College, t Holy Cross Reported Ready To Break Away From EC AC By STEVE SNIDER United Press Sports Writer NEW YORK, N. Y., May 9.— The breakaway i by seven major Southern Conference i colleges to form their own league may give : a few Eastern schools the same idea. Villanova, Boston College and Holy Cross are said to be in favor of a new Eastern ; : league including Army, Navy, Pennsylvania, Penn State and Pittsburgh. . Red hot conference rivalries are the life-blood of collegiate football in most sections and nobody recognized that fact better than the seven Southern colleges that , pulled out of the unwieldy 17-school group that fostered more setups than upsets. But the East is even more unwieldy than the South. The only conference in this section is an unofficial Ivy league of which Pennsylvania is a non-competing football member in 1953. All the big schools out this way are controlled by a central agency known as the Eastern College Athletic Conference. It dictates policy for 98 colleges but obviously can have no conference competition because of its tremendous size. Benefits Listed A new league, in the talking stages for some time, would cut down travel time and scheduling problems, build new rivalries with some point to them and yet still be small enough to permit members to carry on such ancient "outside" traditional games that might have been fostered through the years. The Southern Conference has been a bit of a joke in areas not directly interested in its goings-on — and apparently by some more directly concerned. It was too big to handle a fair football program and too sharply divided between the "haves" and "have-nots" to declare a true champion of national significance. Withdrawing from the group are Duke, North Carolina, North Carolina State, Maryland, Wake Forest, South Carolina and Clemson. Most of them have been strong enough over the years to rate one or more major bowl bids. That leaves 10 smaller fry like Virginia Tech, VMI, Richmond, Davidson, Washington and Lee, William and Mary, The Citadel, West Virginia no slouch, Furman and George Washington. When Maryland and Clemson were set I I down for a year in 195*2 for accepting bowl assignments against the rules of the Southern Conference, there was some agitation for Maryland to join a proposed Eastern Conference, including some of the colleges still interested. The new Southern League eliminates Maryland from that scheme, but the idea remains. Even a top-flight independent like the Michigan State teams of other years had trouble lining up attractive schedules, so the advantages of conference affiliation are obvious. Michigan State, after years of trying, now belongs to the Big Ten. Pittsburgh, which sought for years to get into the Big Ten, is on the outside, but with a rebuilding football power presumably still is interested in a conference berth.
