Now that the Atlantic
Coast Conference will be playing a 20-game conference basketball schedule,
starting this season but much to the chagrin (mildly put) of many of the
15-team league’s head coaches, it’s time to take a deeper dive at equitable scheduling.
What we have is not
equitable. A one-time run through ACC opponents for 14 of 20 conference games
is fair enough. But, the other six games for each school is where balanced
becomes unbalanced.
All ACC teams are not
equal therefore schedules cannot be equally balanced. Duke and North Carolina
headline the league every year. Other ACC members might win a national title
(Virginia most recently) and take national headlines for beating UNC or Duke
during the regular season. If your team has two games in one season against
either or both UNC and Duke, you have a tougher league schedule than those with
one game versus those elite programs. For instance, N.C. State plays Duke and
UNC twice each this year. Is that fair?
There’s no way
schedules can be equaled in one season. So, here is not to reason why but here
is to propose two different scheduling scenarios that over a two-year period
evens the competition.
SCENARIO ONE: Expand to a 21-game
conference schedule. With 15 teams, each league member would play the other 14
teams once and then seven for a second time. The next year, each team would
play all 14 and then the other seven. In two years, each league team will have
played all teams three times, not just once, twice or four times, a huge upside
to equitable scheduling.
The downside, of
course, is UNC and Duke would play one regular season game one year and two the
next, leaving a void in ESPN’s twice a year “Battle of the Blues” with its huge
reach across the United States and around the world. The ACC benefits with the
increased rating, and we all know that ratings equal dollars.
As far as the Wolfpack
playing UNC only three times in two years, giving up a game against UNC every
two years to give the ACC a two-year balanced schedule would be admirable and
probably satisfy the red and white alums who prefer not to lose to UNC most of
the time.
This first scenario is
possible but not probable because the UNC-Duke schedule would bother the
bean counters at league owner ESPN. This brings us to:
SCENARIO TWO: Reduce the number of
conference games to 18. This requires breaking the conference into two
divisions with UNC and Duke in one division and the remaining 13 teams in the
other division. In the latter, each of the 13 teams would play the other six
teams once and six teams twice. The next year, the schedule would reverse so
all 13 teams will have played the other 12 teams three times in two seasons.
None of the 13 would play UNC or Duke. That’s 18 games each for those 13 teams.
UNC and Duke would play
18 times in one season, nine in Chapel Hill and nine in Durham, unless they
agreed to play on some neutral courts such as Greensboro, Charlotte, Madison
Square Garden in New York, the Forum in Los Angeles, in Chicago and other
places, maybe even in London and Paris or in Japan and China. All UNC-Duke
games could be televised on the entire family of ESPN networks with many
different angles explored during the games. Dick Vitale could have his own
channel to rant and rave constantly throughout the broadcast as would Jay
Bilas. These 18 games would create a ratings bonanza, so all 15 league teams
would benefit.
As far as participation
in the ACC Tournament, that’s easy. After the final games of the regular
season, the 12th and 13th teams of the 13-team division have a play-in game on
Tuesday of tournament week. On Wednesday, seeds 5 through 12 play to eliminate
four teams with the winners facing seeds 1-4 on Thursday. Friday night, the
Thursday winners play (semifinals), and the group of 13 finals are played
Saturday afternoon. The winner is congratulated.
So, what about UNC and
Duke in the ACC tournament?
Easy. The two would
play Saturday, with tip-off coming one hour after the 13-team division finals.
The winner of the UNC-Duke game is crowned ACC Champion and receives the
league’s automatic NCAA bid, which is how it should be, of course, and is an
NCAA number one seed. The loser is a number two seed.
And, those are my
suggestions for equitable scheduling of ACC basketball.
