CHARLOTTE, N.C. (WDRB) – ACC Basketball Media Day used to be the land of the giants.
Roy Williams posting up Rick Bozich in a corner to talk about a dadgum column from six months earlier (he was a Bozich fan).
Mike Krzyzewski rolling in with national media in tow, sitting down to solve the game’s problems.
Jim Boeheim asking if they’d opened any good restaurants in North Carolina yet. Rick Pitino ranting that they’d closed a nearby street for a Trump rally. Tony Bennett explaining the beauty in a 47-43 win.
Now? The commissioner is quoting bracketologists like gospel and begging Congress to bail out the church.
The ACC, once a sovereign nation of cutting nets and crafting legends, has been reduced to PowerPoint presentations and “viewership incentives.” Rivalries that spanned generations are being pruned in the name of “scheduling flexibility.” The league’s heart is on Tobacco Road, but its compass increasingly points to Indianapolis in March.
Jim Phillips, the commissioner of what remains, spoke here Tuesday and, to his credit, didn’t pretend otherwise.
“I’ve just been so restless with men’s basketball,” he said. “I don’t know of a better description.”
There probably isn’t one. Restless. Like a mascot during bye week.
Last spring, Louisville finished second in the ACC and runner-up in the league tournament — and got an 8-seed. This, sports fans, is deflation. Once upon a time, finishing second in the ACC meant a warm-up game and a comfy path to the second weekend.
Now, you’re on a bus to Lexington and bounced by Creighton before the ink on anybody’s bracket is dry.
The question faced by Phillips and others is how to fix that.
They decided, in a day when conference networks are clamoring for more “inventory,” that less would be more. The 20-game league schedule has been trimmed to 18. It makes room for “quality nonconference matchups,” like Virginia vs. Ohio State in Nashville, a game that will live in the memory about as well as an episode of NCIS: Des Moines.
But it will look good on a spreadsheet.
This isn’t a basketball strategy. This is what happens when a league spends too much time listening to bracketologists who wear lanyards and call themselves “metrics guys.” They sliced into the bones of their own tradition, hoping the Selection Committee would finally swipe right.
I'm not saying the old days were perfect. But when Dean played Lefty and Krzyzewski glared across the scorer’s table at Gary Williams, you didn’t need a NET rating to know something important was happening.
Now? The ACC has more tech officers than All-Americans and spends more time lobbying Congress than coaching ball screens.
Maybe this is what survival looks like.
The SEC fixed its basketball problem by backing up the Brinks truck for facilities and coaches like Bruce Pearl, Rick Barnes, Buzz Williams, John Calipari, Chris Beard, Nate Oats, Todd Golden, and Mark Pope. They built cathedrals, not spreadsheets. They added games instead of trimming them.
The ACC’s move feels different. It’s the sound of an old league tightening its belt, not flexing its muscle. Maybe necessary. Maybe desperate. Probably both.
The star power is lagging. The game has changed, and the league can’t see its reflection. The ACC doesn’t have a metrics problem. It has a mirror problem. It looks for itself in NET rankings and TV contracts and can’t see the thing it used to be. Or, maybe, the thing it is becoming.
So the conference sits at the intersection of identity and optics, and the blinker is on.
The league will keep rolling. The lights will stay on. But if you listen closely this winter, you may hear something missing. Not silence, but uncertainty. Restlessness can be healthy. But if it doesn’t lead somewhere new, it’s just an empty-arena echo from a three-bid league that forgot to play its greatest hits.
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