The ACC is toying with its baseball postseason again, and still isn’t getting it right. Nor is it getting its conference football schedule anywhere near right.
First, to baseball, which will see two teams added to the ACC Baseball Championship, scheduled for May 23-28 in Louisville.
So we get 12 teams instead of 10, and the teams in the May 28 championship game will be playing their fourth game on the trip, as has been the case the past several years with the old format.
Problem now as then: college baseball is playing in three-game weekend series, meaning teams have three established starters, most going staff day in their mid-week games.
As is the issue with the NCAA Tournament, which uses a double-elimination format in the regionals and then again in the first half of the College World Series, the new ACC Baseball Championship format changes the way the game is played in the regular season when it comes time to decide a champ in postseason.
The NCAA Tournament would be better if it were began a weekend earlier to allow the four-team regional field to play a pair of best-of-three series to determine who advances to the Super Regional, which is already a best of three.
Ditto for the first half of the CWS. Add a weekend there.
So you end up adding two weeks to the tournament. Fine: shorten the regular season a week, and tack a week on at the end, or, and this is radical, get rid of the conference tournaments, which devalue the regular season as it is, and for what?
Back to the ACC Baseball Championship: the two teams who get to the championship aren’t playing at championship strength. They’ve already pitched their weekend guys to get there, so Championship Sunday is your regular batting order, with a staff day on the mound.
Imagine the ACC Tournament champ in basketball being a showcase of the non-rotation guys with an automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament on the line, and you get a decent approximation.
The other issue, with football, is frustrating to fans who have to pretend to be in the same conference with schools in the other division that they see once every decade, if that.
The tradeoff is a requirement that the schools have to schedule one Power 5 opponent each season, which, well, great. But shouldn’t you be scheduling those games anyway, as opposed to going to your local FCS or non-Power 5s for three games a season?
That’s what this is really about, of course. The ACC, like the SEC, which has also kept its conference schedule at eight games, is giving up conference games for the right to schedule as many cupcakes as possible, with entry to the playoff in mind.
Note to the powers-that-be in conference football: the playoff is great, and will be better when expanded. Go even to eight, and you’ll see more meaningful regular-season games, as schools who think themselves playoff-worthy will want the strength of schedule points, and won’t mind risking a good loss to get there.
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