It’s early February, and the inaugural season of the ACC 20-game schedule has reached its midpoint.
One of the reasons offered up as an explanation to the expanded conference schedule (from 18) was the intent of additional quality games for league teams to add to their NCAA tournament resume.
Where the ACC stands at the halfway point through the 20-game gauntlet is that the league may wind up with a bunch of teams finishing at or near the .500 mark.
At this point in the season, there is clearly only one certainty facing the conference, and that is there are only three locks for the March Madness, undoubtedly a scary thought at league headquarters in Greensboro.
So much like the recently-completed ACC football season, where mediocrity prevailed, the once most-vaunted basketball conference in the land finds itself fully engulfed in so-so basketball. The second half of the season may very well unfold where most of the schools just take turns beating one another into mediocrity.
Currently only two teams reside in the respected Ken Pomeroy’s top 10 efficiency rating (Louisville, Duke), while Florida State is hovering in the lower teens, with the rest of the league mired in, you guessed it, mediocrity land.
Injuries have decimated North Carolina, leaving the Tar Heels with the distinct possibility of playing on the opening day of the ACC tourney, and many of the league’s top players from last season are now playing-for-pay in the NBA.
These are some of the reasons offered up as to the league’s woes this season.
Having followed the league for nearly 40 years, this is as about as a weak of a conference I can ever remember. I go all the way back to a 14-game conference schedule, with only the tourney winner dancing into the postseason.
The 20-game conference schedule is too much. Creating more “quality games” was simply an easy out for the conference.
Propping up what has so far been a disaster, the ACC Network, was the real reason. A conference game to open the season, that is now over three months ago, is absurd.
Does anyone remember Virginia beating Syracuse three weeks before Thanksgiving?
So here we are at the midway point in the conference schedule, and outside of a a few teams, the league finds itself getting swallowed up-by itself.
And that may be less than mediocrity
Where’s that 14-game schedule when you need it?
Story by Scott German
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