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A t times, all the impassioned phone calls seemed reminiscent of a frst romance. Late on the night before Tanksgiving, Ramsey, in the Bahamas with the basketball team for a tournament, noticed that he had missed a call from Swoford, the ACC���s commissioner, hours earlier. ���I was freaking out because I didn���t know if I should call back,��� Ramsey says. ���It was late at night, the night before Tanksgiving. So I asked my wife, ���Should I call him now? Should I wait? Should I call him now?������ You have to wonder if Jane Ramsey wasn���t thinking, ���Oh, for heaven���s sake, ask him to the prom already!��� Ramsey erred on the side of holiday courtesy. Fortunately, Jurich had reached Swoford two days earlier, the Monday morning that he and Terrilynn were returning to Louisville from Florida. Swoford confrmed to Jurich that, yes, U of L was under consideration. ���I knew that Monday for sure that they were looking to replace Maryland,��� Jurich says. ���Until then, a lot of people thought that maybe they didn���t need to replace anybody.��� So after a weekend ���vacation��� of networking, Jurich at least could rest assured that he wasn���t mining for fool���s gold. Tis prize was real. B ack at the conference table outside his ofce, Jurich is ticking of the assets he worked with during his sales job: ���At the time I was going through this, we had four teams in the top 10 ��� football was 9, volleyball was 9, men���s basketball was 2, women���s basketball was 6. We could talk it and we could walk it. And, most important, we���re a clean program.��� At that, he knocks on the wooden table. (U of L has not run afoul of the NCAA during Jurich���s tenure.) He called Kevin White, the athletic director at Duke. In the mid-2000s, as the athletic director at Notre Dame, White helped shepherd Louisville into the Big East. Actually, the White-Jurich connection goes back 30 years: White was at the University of Maine, Jurich at Northern Arizona. ���Our frst conversation was about domed stadiums,��� says Jurich in a way that makes you think he could recall the topic of every frst conversation he���s had with every person in his Rolodex. ���Tom is a phenomenal visionary ��� and has an unquantifable ability to both build and maintain ���world class��� relationships,��� says White, adding that the ACC���s acquisition of Louisville is ���almost as good as acquiring Tom Jurich as a highly seasoned national player.��� Jurich called Dr. Darryl Gross, the athletic director at Syracuse. ���Tey didn���t have a vote, but they had a voice,��� Jurich explains. ���And voices control votes.��� Says Gross, ���Tom made Louisville athletics a national brand. I just tried to relay the good news about Louisville to the ACC.��� Jurich reached out to athletic director Randy Spetman at Florida State. Spetman had been athletic director at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs when Jurich held the same position at Colorado State. When Jurich���s son Brian attended a summer camp for wrestling at the academy, he stayed with Spetman. ���When Tom called, I told him I thought they had already done it all,��� Spetman says. ���Tey had the resources, the fan base, the academics were getting better and the facilities had been upgraded. . . . I had the opportunity to go to the Kentucky Derby this year and got a tour of the new basketball arena. It���s incredible. I told them to come build us one.��� ���Tom made Louisville athletics a national brand. I just tried to relay the good news about Louisville to the ACC.��� ��� Darryl Gross, Syracuse athletic director Top-rated sports teams aside, U of L couldn���t compete when it came to television markets. UConn on the East Coast, Cincinnati, South Florida in Tampa, the Naval Academy at Annapolis, near Washington, D.C., and Central Florida in Orlando were some of the other schools jockeying for the ACC���s attention. Each boasts a bigger TV market. Why is this a big deal? Well, part of West Virginia���s appeal to the Big 12 was that it claimed the D.C. television market. Never mind that Mountaineer football and basketball don���t exactly sound like a must-see for Washingtonians hooked on the Redskins, Nationals, Wizards, Capitols and Hoyas. So Jurich the connector worked his worlds. 64 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 3.13 ���Te common thinking was that UConn was ���next in line��� for the ACC if it needed another school,��� says Brett McMurphy, who covers college sports for ESPN. ���However, ACC sources told me Jurich simply outworked UConn and made the ACC schools more aware of what Louisville had to ofer as an athletic program and university. Unlike 99 percent of the other ADs, Jurich also was upfront with the Big East. . . . He wasn���t doing all this behind their backs.��� F or more than a year, the conventional wisdom had been that, if U of L were to switch conferences, it would be to the Big 12, which actually has only 10 teams, including Big East refugee West Virginia. So Jurich, Ramsey and others with an interest, like U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, a U of L alum, had worked the Big 12 angle. McConnell had served in the Senate with David Boren, Oklahoma���s president, and knew former U.S. Rep. Kent Hance, the chancellor at Texas Tech. He also knew Kenneth Starr, the president of Baylor and the former independent counsel who investigated the Clinton administration. Ramsey knew Bernadette Gray-Little, chancellor of the University of Kansas, from his days at North Carolina, and Iowa State���s president, Gregory Geofroy, a U of L grad. One Friday afternoon two summers ago, Ramsey took a call from a president at a Big 12 school. Tere was a conference meeting in Dallas the following Monday. Te possibility of expansion might come up. Could Ramsey provide some information? So the U of L put together a thick spiral notebook touting 15 years of athletic progress and the proper ���academic trajectory,��� according to Ramsey. ���We emailed it to the Big 12 ofce,��� he says, ���and even put a guy on an airplane to hand-deliver it down there in Dallas. . . . But I thought we were a long shot with the Big 12.��� Jurich didn���t. ���I think we were extremely close,��� he says. ���To this day, I think we were going to be their top choice (after West Virginia). We have incredible contacts there, and I worked that thing tirelessly with Sen. McConnell, who was phenomenal. . . . Tey wanted West Virginia because they had such a strong (football) tradition. I think if they had gone to 11, it would have been us.���