I hate to agree with Jim Boeheim on anything, but he’s absolutely right about the nonsense way the ACC opened the 2019-2020 basketball season.
“You never want to play the league games early. That’s stupid. It’s just a money grab,” Boeheim said after Syracuse laid a big, smelly egg in a 48-34 loss to defending national champ Virginia.
He added that he would have felt the same way had his team won, and I actually agree with him on that, and I’d bet UVA coach Tony Bennett would as well.
Because honestly, what do either of them – or any of us – know about their teams after that game?
Syracuse lost three of its top four scorers from a year ago – Tyus Battle, Oshae Brissett and Frank Howard.
Virginia lost its top three – Kyle Guy, De’Andre Hunter and Ty Jerome.
Both Boeheim and Bennett are going to be figuring out who is going to take the minutes left open, and it will likely take some time to get to where either squad feels fully formed.
It might be mid-January before we know what either is going to look like this year.
But because of the rollout of the ACC Network, and the push to add to the league schedule, now at a back-breaking 20 games, we got this clunker of a basketball game in the first week of November.
Syracuse shot 23.5 percent. Virginia committed 16 turnovers. The teams combined to make nine of their 53 three-point tries.
It was ugly basketball, and for what? The ACC Network still isn’t available on major cable carriers like Comcast, and you can tell the folks in the ad-sales department at ESPN are having a hard time moving inventory, with multiple commercial slots for the World’s Greatest Pot, Grotrax and a litany of $19.99 As Seen on TV products mixed in with house ads for the network and for ESPN.
There’s no way ESPN and the ACC are making any money on this right now, and yet, we had that … performance.
Would you rather have seen Hamilton when it was ready for the Richard Rogers Theatre, or back when it was being workshopped in Poughkeepsie?
The UVA-Syracuse game we got last night was Poughkeepsie.
We actually do get a Part 2, but it’s scheduled for Jan. 11 in Charlottesville.
Not sure that’s Richard Rogers Theatre-quality quite yet, but it’s what we get.
Again, damn, it hurts to agree with Jim Boeheim on anything, but he’s dead on here.
“I just don’t think it’s good. I don’t think it’s smart,” he said. “You want to build up to league. The league’s the most important thing, so why would you play the first game of the year in the league? Makes no sense to me, but that’s what happens when you go up to 20 games, and someone wants you to play early.”
Story by Chris Graham
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