In March, the most powerful man in college basketball — Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski — averred that the reconfigured ACC, once it reaches full-grown status, will be “the most powerful basketball conference, I think, ever.”
He has a case. Syracuse, Pitt and Notre Dame will begin playing ACC basketball this season, with Louisville set to join in 2014. Come next season, five of the 15 ACC programs will have won NCAA titles, with three of the five winning more than one. Of the five active coaches enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame, four will be based in the ACC. Of the 15 ACC programs as of 2014, 11 will have graced a Final Four.
On paper, it looks splendid. But here we wonder if a bigger ACC will indeed be a better ACC.
Duke and Carolina? Great programs. Syracuse and Louisville? Great programs. But that’s only four of 15. What of Virginia Tech and Boston College? What of Georgia Tech, which played for the NCAA title in 2004 but has made the Big Dance only three times since? What of Miami, which won both the ACC regular-season and tournament titles last season, but has lost nearly every player of consequence?
When we think of great conferences, we think of the nine-team Big East in 1984-85: Georgetown entered as the reigning NCAA titlist and lost only three games, all to league brethren. Big East teams comprised three-fourths of the 1985 Final Four, Villanova famously upsetting the Hoyas in the championship game.
We think of the eight-team ACC in the 1983-84, when North Carolina entered the conference tournament ranked No. 1 in the land but lost to Duke in the semis. Duke then lost to Maryland in the final. None of the above reached the Final Four. Virginia did, the Virginia in Year 1 after Ralph Sampson, the Virginia that finished sixth in the ACC’s regular season.
Those leagues were neither too big nor too small. They had geographic rhyme and reason and simmering rivalries. They had top-shelf players. (The Big East in 1985 featured Patrick Ewing, Walter Berry, Chris Mullin, Pearl Washington and Ed Pinckney. The ACC in 1984 included Michael Jordan, Sam Perkins, Johnny Dawkins, Len Bias, Mark Price and Lorenzo Charles.)
In the era of one-and-done, we’ll never see such collections of talent again. With plus-sized conferences, rivalries and tradition have taken a hike. Duke and Carolina will still be a must-watch game, and so will Syracuse-Louisville (albeit under a different heading), but will the lesser games featuring lesser programs get lost? And will lesser programs, because they’re not Duke and Carolina, be doomed to staying lesser?
The new ACC is a tantalizing creation. In theory, it could become to basketball what the SEC is to football. The question is whether Bigger and Better could actually turn out to be Too Big.
