The Atlantic Coast Conference has decided to expand for a variety of reasons, but first and foremost the ACC wants to broaden its image.

The ACC is identified by most college sports fans as a basketball league, with Duke and North Carolina on Tobacco Road and Maryland a little further north, and this is clearly a move to strengthen the conference from a football standpoint.

	Will Kevin Jones and Virginia Tech be left out of a super-sized ACC?

Basketball has always been the show there, and even with a team like Florida State in the football mix, the tradition of the storied hoops programs outweighs anything happening on the gridiron.

The ACC brass would not only reap the benefits of bringing in a perennial power like Miami, but of adding two additional teams to create a 12-team league with two divisions and a conference championship game.

Where the ACC would stand in the pecking order of football conferences would depend on which schools come along with Miami, and from a football perspective I don't know how three schools could come out of the Big East without Virginia Tech being one of them.

Syracuse and Boston College have a lot to offer with the rest of their athletic departments, and academics certainly play a part in inviting teams into a conference, but with the power and prestige college football has today the ACC would be missing the boat if it left the Hokies out.

I can't understand how there can even be a discussion about bringing in three teams without Hokies, and until it crosses the wire that Miami, Syracuse and Boston College are all in, I refuse to believe that Virginia Tech will be out in the cold.

Florida State is a great team year after year, Maryland and N.C. State are developing into great teams and Virginia is improving drastically, and the addition of a Miami-VT-Syracuse triumvirate would definitely give the impression that the ACC is ready to compete, top-to-bottom, with the big boys from the SEC, Big 12 and Big Ten.

As for the the Big East, it's hard to imagine it could survive with only the five remaining teams -- Pittsburgh, West Virginia, Rutgers, Temple and UConn -- and you have to believe that conference would look elsewhere and try to bring other teams into the fold. It would be nearly impossible for the Big East presidents to stand pat after losing three of the best teams in the conference.

The bigger concern, though, is whether those remaining teams would also decide to move on. Does the Big Ten now decide that Pittsburgh is an attractive candidate to become its 12th team?

That would be an obvious scenario since Pitt fits in geographically and would be a natural rival for Penn State, and because head coach Walt Harris has strong ties to Ohio State and the rest of Big Ten country. He recruits much of the same turf as the Big Ten coaches, and with college football being so competitive in January and February that could lay the foundation for other budding rivalries.

Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany made it clear to me in a conversation last week, though, that his conference is not going to go after a 12th team just to keep up. He left no doubt that another team will be added only when it behooves the Big Ten, not as a reactionary move to what the ACC has done.

And the one thing you can almost surely bank on in the Big Ten is that Notre Dame would not be that team. With Tyrone Willingham revitalizing their program, the Irish would be crazy to give up the TV money they make from NBC and the BCS, so the focus naturally turns to Pittsburgh.

In the end, the ACC is looking to capitalize on what the SEC and Big 12 have been able to do with their championship games, not only in the image department but also from a financial standpoint. Those conferences stage championship games which are high-profile TV events, and the ACC wants not only that national exposure but a chance to get a second team into the Bowl Championship Series, which would mean millions of dollars in the conference coffers.

It remains to be seen what other dominoes may fall around college football, but this move sends a clear signal that the ACC is looking to become a serious player on the NCAA's two biggest stages.

Kirk Herbstreit is an analyst for ESPN College GameDay and a regular contributor to ESPN.com during the college football season.