Future ACC hoops scheduling a mess

New math complicates ACC hoops schedule
By Larry Keech, Staff Writer, Greensboro News & Record

GREENSBORO -- The ACC's recent expansion from nine to 11 members confronted the league's coaches and fans with a lesson in basic arithmetic: 11 into 16 won't go.

The inclusion of Miami and Virginia Tech turned the traditional home-and-home round robin basketball schedule into a dinosaur. Now it's up to ACC coaches, athletics directors and associate commissioner Fred Barakat to devise a reasonable alternative.

Barakat already has devised two prospective models of 11-team, 16-game schedules, one of which is likely to be adopted by ACC athletics directors in the coming weeks to debut when the two new members begin competing in the 2004-05 season.

"I was a great fan of the double round robin," said Wake Forest coach Skip Prosser. "It was one reason why I came to Wake (from Xavier) two years ago. The new schedule might be less than ideal. But it's coming, so let's play it."

In Barakat's two scheduling models, each ACC team is paired with "permanent partners" it would play on a home-and-home basis every year. Model A proposes two permanent partners; Model B proposes four.

Under Model A, the four ACC teams in North Carolina could not play home-and-home series' against all three of the others every year. Discounting the two permanent partners, each team would play four of the remaining eight teams twice and four once each year. The groups of four would rotate every year.

Under Model B, each team would play its four permanent partners plus two other home-and-home series every year. The two home-and-home teams would be grouped with the other four in a three-year rotation.

Model A insures every team will play every other team at least three times in two seasons. Model B insures every team will play every league opponent at least four times in three seasons.

Resigned to losing the home-and-home round robin, most ACC coaches and other schedule-makers are trying to focus on the benefits of the new formats. All covet the scheduling flexibility they derive from limiting conference games to 16.

Georgia Tech coach Paul Hewitt looks forward to the end of a schedule which he perceived as a factor in the long-time domination of the league by the four teams in North Carolina.

"All the programs in North Carolina are used to playing three road games every season after which they can still get a good night's sleep in their own beds," Hewitt said. "I'm all for anything that will equalize the travel burdens and perhaps level the playing field a little bit more."

Most coaches subscribe to the establishment of permanent partners as a means of preserving existing rivalries. The permanent partners plan represents a departure from the Big Ten Conference's 11-team schedule that places all opponents in an equal rotation. Two Big Ten in-state rivals, Indiana and Purdue, played a non-conference game against each other during the past season.

"I'd love to see the Big Four stay together, but the new schedule isn't going to be what everybody finds most comfortable," Prosser said. "Everybody has to give a little."

Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski's perennially strong team figures to be one of the most coveted permanent partners, partly because most Duke games are attractive to TV networks.

North Carolina, N.C. State, Wake Forest, Maryland and Virginia all would welcome permanent partnerships with Duke. No more than four of those five and perhaps as few as two can be accommodated.

"The challenge (of a new ACC scheduling format) will be to assign compatible partners," said Mike Cragg, Duke's assistant AD who assists Krzyzewski in assembling the Blue Devils' schedules.

"We'd certainly want to protect our rivalries, or at least our rivalry (North Carolina). So the four-partner plan might work better from our standpoint."

Two new ACC coaches, Clemson's Oliver Purnell and Seth Greenberg of Virginia Tech, were quick to cite the advantages posed by a new conference alignment.

"When I was on the outside looking in, I didn't think the ACC was getting credit in NCAA tournament selections for the Murderer's Row they had to go through every year," Purnell said. "It seemed like there was almost an anti-ACC bias.

"Preserving the rivalries was my biggest concern about losing the round robin. My preferences for partners probably would be based on geography. Georgia Tech is just down the road, and our football rivalry with Florida State could spill over to basketball."

Greenberg, like most of his colleagues at Virginia Tech, is glad his program now is in a conference that his more compatible geographically.

"We're now in a conference where we belong," Greenberg said. "I talked to two former Tech coaches, Bill Foster and Charlie Moir. Both said we have to recruit the two-state Virginia-North Carolina area to be successful. ACC membership will give us a higher profile nearby as well as outside the area."

Larry Gallo, a senior associate AD who's involved with basketball scheduling, expressed confidence in Barakat's ability to formulate an 11-team schedule with minimal difficulty.

"If anybody can make this thing work, Fred can," Gallo said. "He'll be pulled a lot of different ways, but he's a consummate juggler, a master of the television package, and you can be sure he's done his homework."

 

I understand unc-chapel hill is asking that Clemson & Va Tech be 2 of their "permanent parters".

 

Yeah, cause it is pretty common knowledge that we always play an easy schedule.