ACC gets no respect come tournament time
The Atlantic Coast Conference has won three men's basketball national championships in this decade - Duke in 2001, Maryland in 2002 and North Carolina in 2004.
Sprinkle in a glittering nonconference record and utter domination of the Big 10 in the leagues' annual challenge, and you would figure that the ACC would be sitting pretty come NCAA Tournament time every March.
So how was it, then, that the conference was able to land only four teams in the Big Dance this past season - as many as the midmajor Missouri Valley?
"We have more national champions in this conference than any other conference in the United States. We've had more number-one seeds - more, more, more, more. I just don't think in the last five years that our conference has gotten rewarded," Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski told "ACC Nation" at the ACC Operation Basketball media day held in Greensboro, N.C., earlier this month.
"You have three national champions in this decade - three different schools. Somebody plays against those people. Somebody loses close games, or wins some - but whatever, if you have three programs that are winning national championships, you've probably lost more than won. How did you lose - did you play all three of those programs in one week or 10 days? That's the weighted stuff that has not been considered fully enough by the people who make decisions," Krzyzewski said.
"Our conference deserves more than - in any year - more than four teams. Closer to six or seven. But never four. I don't know what's happened - but that's been a mistake, I think," Krzyzewski said.
Duke was one of the four teams to receive a bid into March Madness at the end of the 2005-2006 season - along with Boston College, North Carolina and North Carolina State.
Left off the list was Florida State, which finished with a 20-10 overall mark and 9-7 league record, and Maryland, which was 8-8 in league play and 19-13 overall.
FSU coach Leonard Hamilton clearly still feels the pain of the decision of the tournament-selection committee to leave his squad on the outside looking in.
"Obviously, we were disappointed that we weren't selected - but there was no doubt in our mind that we earned the right. Every coach in the country knows that we deserved to be in the NCAA tournament," Hamilton told "ACC Nation" at ACC Operation Basketball.
"We got caught up in some political issues. We got caught up in the tweaking of the formula that's used to evaluate. That's kind of a moving target that you have no control over. We scheduled people who were in the NCAA tournament, who were preseason picked to have great years, who had bad years. You can't do anything about that," Hamilton said.
"The perception of our league is that Duke and North Carolina has earned the right to be the face of our league. They are two of the top five winningest programs in the history of college basketball. And they are driving our league. But the fact of it is that they have reached down and they have pulled everybody else up - and that has gotten lost in the shuffle. People don't realize how much this gap has narrowed," Hamilton said.
"There were 105 games in our league last year where the games were decided by five points or less. That gets absolutely no recognition from the media whatsoever. It means that there are 105 games going on in the ACC where the game's in doubt going down the stretch regardless of who you're playing. That says to me that the top teams are struggling with the so-called teams that are not supposed to be very good," Hamilton said.
"There's a mindset in the league that's gone unnoticed by the media and everyone else that has not given this recognition," Hamilton said.
Maryland coach Gary Williams - one of three ACC coaches to have a national championship on his resume, along with Krzyzewski and North Carolina coach Roy Williams - thinks coaches and administrators need to do more to try to change that perception.
"I think we have to talk about it. I don't think it's something that you can just hope goes away," Williams said. "Times have changed. There's a lot of leagues lobbying against the ACC now. There's a lot of new teams that spend enough money to be good basketball teams - in other words, they've increased their budgets and things like that to match teams in the so-called major conferences."
Williams, like his ACC coaching brethren, professed to not being able to understand how the conference could land only four teams in the big tournament.
"We were rated the third-best conference in the country. We beat the Big 10 for the seventh straight year in the ACC-Big 10 Challenge, but the Big 10 has gotten more teams in five of those seven years," Williams said."A team like Florida State going 9-7 in our league and not going - that's not right," Williams said. "You look at the makeup of the NCAA tournament last year, and it was really different than previous years. And things seemed to count more than counted before. Our strength of schedule was 10th in the country on Selection Sunday - but it didn't seem to have any effect. So maybe that's not as important as getting 23 or 24 wins, like the Air Force, for example, who did not beat a top 50 team during the year."
Georgia Tech coach Paul Hewitt was nowhere near the bubble last spring - his team finished 11-17 in 2005-2006 - but the Yellow Jackets did factor in to one midmajor's at-large berth.
"We played Air Force, and we lost to Air Force, and that was a quality win for Air Force. Maryland beat us twice, it wasn't a quality win for Maryland," Hewitt said.
"For some reason, I don't know why, there are different theories, but over the last couple of years or last few years, people have devalued the quality of ACC basketball - regardless of the fact that we have the best recruiting classes year-in and year-out across the board, regardless of the fact that we have more and more draft picks, again, across the board, top to bottom in our league. For some reason, when we get them, we screw them up. They're good before we get them, and they're good after they leave us - but when they're with us, our league is down," Hewitt said.
"I can't figure that out," Hewitt said.
ACC commissioner John Swofford feels the level of play in the conference in '06-'07 will do a lot to reverse the trend of the past few seasons with regard to NCAA berths.
"The standards are so high in this league. There are a lot of leagues out there that would like to have this league's down years in basketball, to be very honest with you," Swofford told "ACC Nation." "But you compare yourself to what you have come to consider the norm - and in this league, that's an awfully high standard. We didn't quite meet it last year in terms of the number of teams we feel like we should have in the NCAA tournament.
"It's almost gotten to a point where if there's not a team from the ACC in the Final Four, something seems to be missing. And that's a good thing," Swofford said.
- Chris Graham