Whether the ACC is weak or strong depends on what you value. As the ACC likes to point out, its schools are very good at the sports few people watch. Notre Dame is one of the rare Division I schools with a fencing program. UNC is great at field hockey. Stanford wins more gold than anyone else in what are commonly called the “Olympic sports.” In the big-money sports—football and men’s basketball, though women’s basketball is on the rise—you have to squint. UNC and NC State’s recent underdog Final Four runs have helped perceptions. Clemson’s brief dynasty went a long way. Florida State is trying to do the same thing Clemson did. But the problem which held FSU out of last year’s College Football Playoff is one that persists, year over year, and it’s one that affects men’s basketball as well:
The ACC is top-heavy.
It is easier to post a good record in the ACC than it is in the rest of the Power Four.
In basketball, the way this functions is that Duke and UNC are almost always among the twenty best programs in the country, and as two of the biggest brands in the sport, their prominence is prominent. Not only are Duke and UNC good, but fans know they’re good. The SEC and Big 12 have more teams annually in that mix, but by virtue of not always being Kentucky and Kansas, some of those teams fly under the radar. If a program earns a 2-seed but they’re not a blue-blood or a national champ, do they make a sound? Factor in the ACC’s recent trend to have some outright terrible teams,* and there’s no all-encompassing metric that looks kindly upon the Atlantic Coast Conference. By the most reasonable assessment—how easy or hard it is to post a good record—the league is worse than its counterparts. Arguments in the league’s favor rely on oddities like NC State, a 15-loss team who technically finished third in the country.
In football, the way this functions is that the conference usually has only one or two potential national contenders at the beginning of the year, and that contender is often of a stature where they wouldn’t be called a contender if they played in the Big Ten or SEC. Thanks to format, Florida State stands arguably the best chance of anyone in the country to earn the third seed in this year’s playoff. Florida State’s likeliest regular season record is 10–3. Again, no meaningful metric says the ACC is strong. By the most reasonable assessment—how easy or hard it is to post a good record—the league is worse than its counterparts. Cherry pick with enough precision, though, and you can claim the league has the third-best team.
I dislike rehashing how we know the ACC is a bad league in these sports. It’s tedious and annoying and involves a coach who lost at home to Georgia Tech whining that a Big 12 school scheduled the same Alcorn State team he did. It’s not productive for the ACC, either. ACC schools have spent too much effort in recent years trying to win the argument by arguing. How’s that going? Let’s ask commissioner Jim Phillips, who said yesterday that the ACC is…well, it might not be the best, but it’s at least in the top three!**
I don’t want to keep arguing about whether the ACC might secretly be good. What I’d like to happen, and what I think most college sports fans want to happen (since this would keep the ACC alive), is for the ACC to become good. I want the ACC to end the argument the straightforward way.
There’s a nihilistic streak in the college sports zeitgeist which says this can’t happen. It says finances are destiny, and that if a school doesn’t have Big Ten or SEC revenue, that school can’t compete with the Big Ten or the SEC. Is this true? Is the ACC doomed? Of course not. It’s harder with less money, but winning can still be done. Gonzaga didn’t become a consistent Final Four contender because of a lavish WCC media deal. TCU didn’t rise from the Mountain West to the CFP championship by paying Max Duggan millions of dollars. It’s harder in football than in basketball, but everything is harder in football than in basketball. If it all came down to resources, Notre Dame and Texas would have done better than a combined 0–3 record in the four-team playoff era. If it all came down to resources, LSU would have made the four-team playoff more than once. Washington has more playoff appearances in its history than Texas A&M, Penn State, Mississippi, Florida State, and Auburn combined. It’s won more playoff games than every program in the country except for four.
It sounds stupid, and it is certainly simple. Of course it would help the ACC to win. But when a league’s coaches are blaming their conference’s impotence on the SEC having Paul Finebaum, stupidity is too far into the room for simplicity to sit idly by. Bigger and more engaged fanbases help. They certainly help. But the best way to make those is to develop better teams.
One last attempt to make this clear, since I anticipate a lot of ACC people presently prefer to lament their woeful luck:
College sports are becoming more professional. Revenue sharing is going to exist, and player “payroll” is going to be uneven across what’s now the Power Four. This is the case in Major League Baseball as well. It’s true, in baseball, that the two winningest franchises in the last twenty years are the Yankees and the Dodgers. But can you guess who comes in third? It’s a team that plays in the 23rd-largest metro in the United States. It’s a team whose payroll has only occasionally found the top ten. It’s a team who’s won the same number of World Series these last twenty years as the five New York and Southern California franchises combined. If the St. Louis Cardinals compete in a sport where one team spends six times as much as another, Louisville is capable of becoming a national power. Even without its own engaging little bald man on the radio.
*Notre Dame, Louisville, and Georgia Tech have all been even worse than Boston College over much of the last three years.
**I can’t decide whether Phillips’s top-three claim was impressively humble or impressively oblivious. The man gave up on comparing his conference to the Big Ten or the SEC and indulged Brett Yormark’s ACC vs. Big 12 battle instead. Then, he had to rely on Florida State and Clemson to make all his pro-ACC points, all while Florida State and Clemson try to leave the ACC because it isn’t competitive enough.
Miscellany
- The Packers will probably overpay Jordan Love, and that’s just kind of what you have to do. As a Packer fan myself, I admittedly love that he’s “holding in” instead of holding out. What does that mean? He’s at training camp, and he’s engaged; he just isn’t actively doing anything physical which could risk an injury before his extension gets figured out. It’s warm and cheery, but it’s also probably smart? Even if Love’s being cynical with it (I don’t really think he is, but even if he is), and even if his teammates and coaches see through that, why not foster goodwill with the fans? It can’t hurt the guy.
- The James Paxton DFA is a great example of how to respond to a 40-man roster crunch. Rather than get rid of the worst asset on the 40-man, the Dodgers proactively made space by starting the waiver purgatory process with a player they’d like to trade anyway. They have enough of a starting pitching surplus in theory for Paxton to be expendable, and they know the market wants starting pitching in the next seven days. It’s not earthshaking, and it’s a little thing, but it’s one of those maneuvers which make the Dodgers so impressive organizationally. They do all that little stuff right, with the one exception so far being their playoff performance. That’s an important exception! But it does make one think they’re proactively looking for solutions, as long as they believe it’s more than a problem of sample size.
- Sam Vecenie’s been admirably honest over on the Bronny James beat, and his writeup on Bronny’s Summer League performance kept that up. This was the most interesting line, to me: “Despite his reputation for being a positive team defender, I felt like James impacted the Lakers negatively with his consistent lack of activity whenever his man did not have the ball.” Vecenie goes into much more detail, but hearing Bronny’s defense criticized was interesting to hear for the exact reason Vecenie stated: It was something which drew praise in the pre-draft process. I don’t know if this is what the LeBron James industry did, but if I wanted to strategically make a case for a player who didn’t belong around the NBA Draft, I’d probably choose to pump up an aspect of their game that’s hard to measure and often graded subjectively.
