ACC Basketball Equitable Scheduling

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.