The ACC has been very good early this season.
Before you ask, ‘How does this affect me, Syracuse basketball fan,’ let me explain.
The better the league performs in non-conference games, the better that is for the ACC overall and for Syracuse specifically.
The ACC needs to return to being one of the premier men’s basketball conferences in the country if it hopes to get more teams playing in March Madness.
Wake Forest nearly took down No. 6 Michigan in Detroit on Tuesday night. Wake, plagued by foul trouble, forced the Wolverines to overtime and could have won on a driving layup at the buzzer that didn’t go down.
Florida State came within two points of No. 10 Florida on that same day. Neither Wake nor FSU is ranked. And while neither of those teams won, they competed on the road and nearly toppled the heavily favored team.
And we haven’t yet touched upon Virginia Tech’s win on the road at Providence, or Louisville’s huge home win against rival Kentucky. Or Duke being among the top-two teams nationally on the big metric sites.
The ACC was a collective 49-4 after 10 games this season. Last year, it was 42-6. About the only team to truly disrupt the conference flow this season is Boston College, which is 1-2 with losses to FAU on the road (not terrible) and Central Connecticut at home (terrible).
And while the collective records might not show a startling improvement, Andy Fledderjohann at the ACC provided me with more robust information: The margin of victory is significantly higher than last year. (Plus-24.2 now compared to plus-15.5 a season ago.)
Syracuse, specifically, has outscored its first two opponents by nearly 40 points per game. (The ACC thanks the Orange.) Last year, SU won its first two games (Le Moyne, Colgate) by a total of six points.
Ken Pomeroy currently ranks the ACC fourth among all DI conferences. That could change. But remember this: There were times when the ACC sat below the Big East and the Mountain West and ranked seventh in KenPom’s metrics.
We know the conference did some research after last season’s disappointing lack of NCAA Tournament invitations to figure out how to better game the NET and write a formula for more post-season success.
The ACC, cognizant of the fact that teams were getting into the NCAA Tournament with sub-.500 conference records, decided to lop two games off each ACC member’s conference schedule and allow them to add two more non-con games.
And you’d have to assume schools were consulted about how to spend their money. Or, more precisely, how to delegate more money to their men’s basketball programs.
NOTE: This story was emailed this morning to people signed up for Donna Ditota’s newsletter. You can sign up for free here.
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