Selections Are Maddening to ACC
Coaches Open Season With Hopes of Seeing More Bids
A perceived lack of respect in the ACC's depth has the league's coaches -- like Virginia Tech's Seth Greenberg -- scratching their head about future NCAA tournament possibilities.
(Jonathan Newton - TWP)
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Monday, November 10, 2008
College basketball season officially begins tonight, but for the past month, Atlantic Coast Conference basketball coaches have been on edge, fingers figuratively above holsters, ready to draw and fire fortifying facts at anyone who dares cast a critical glare in their direction.
The ACC held the top RPI ranking of any conference in the nation last season. The ACC recorded the second-best nonconference winning percentage among all Division I conferences last season. The ACC won the ACC-Big Ten Challenge last season, its ninth victory in as many tries.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
The coaches' trigger fingers are itchy because the depth of the ACC has come under scrutiny in recent years, and the coaches don't understand why the conference's reputation has been sullied.
"I think there is great parity in this league," Virginia Tech Coach Seth Greenberg said.
However, the ACC received four bids to the 2008 NCAA tournament, after getting seven a year earlier, and enters this season with two consensus top-flight teams. The distance separating North Carolina and Duke from the next tier of ACC teams, some coaches admit, is vast. The critical question, then, is whether the ACC's parity equates to high-quality play.
"You put [North Carolina and Duke] in any league and they'll do well cause they're two of the top teams in the country," Miami Coach Frank Haith said. "But it's not, 'Because it's the ACC, there's a gap.' It would be that way if they were in any league."
Haith's Miami squad is one of a handful of teams the ACC will count on this season to prove its depth is not an issue. With four starters returning from a 23-win team that advanced to the second round of the NCAA tournament a year ago, Miami projects as a team on the rise. The Hurricanes are No. 17 in the Associated Press top 25 preseason poll, the first time since 1999 they have entered a season ranked.
Overseeing an experienced roster is not a luxury exclusive to Haith. The ACC returns 72 percent of its starters from last season, including 11 all-conference selections. Coaches said there is no substitute for having players that, as Haith put it, "have been through the wars."
ACC coaches were not as fortunate entering last season, when the conference returned 65 percent of its starters and just five all-conference selections. Having to guide relatively young squads through conference schedules that Clemson Coach Oliver Purnell called "murderous" led coaches to bemoan the apparent lack of understanding when the ACC earned so few NCAA tournament bids.
Wake Forest Coach Dino Gaudio says the ACC constitutes "the best conference in America" and its depth is evident in that six teams held conference records within a result of, or at, .500 last season.
"The perception of the RPI ranking of the ACC that Duke and North Carolina inflate it is inaccurate," he said. "You look at last year, if you took out North Carolina and Duke, the ACC would have tied with the Big 12 for the best top-six conference winning percentage at 55 percent. When everybody says it's Duke and [North] Carolina, they're wrong."
