Changes to the ACC’s Format?

[jjasper0729]

Bear Bryant said one time that you should never have more than 10 teams in a conference.

When expansion came up, I whole heartedly hoped they would only take one school to be able to keep the round-robin format. Having worked in the SEC at one point, I saw how the "division" model made things unbalanced both in basketball and football.

USC left in 1971. GT rounded it back out to eight in 1978.

The three division idea makes the most sense in conjunction with an 18-game schedule. It also precludes the "division" finish from having an effect on the tournament seeding or standings (since there are three, rather than two... again, see the SEC division format).

Also, the idea of the conferences was to keep things geographically concentrated for the express purpose of cutting down on travel costs. It wasn't until the explosion of TV money that conferences lost their geographical focii

[-jk]

Sheesh! It's only been two months since we last visited this topic, but that won't discourage me from reposting:

Split the ACC into two divisions, Upper and Lower. Each team plays a double round robin within division (10 games) and single games across division (six games), and maybe an extra game or two across divisions (call it the Duke-UNC rule).

Leads to killer SOS in the Upper division, and lots of great TV match-ups, and the chance for a strong Lower division team to really stand out.

At the end of the season, the top four teams in the Upper division stay Upper and the bottom four teams in Lower stay Lower. The bottom two teams in Upper swap divisions with the top two teams in Lower.

The middle of the pack battles in both divisions would go down to the the end of the season. No one near the bottom of Lower would coast down the stretch if they had a chance to move to Upper, and the middle of the Upper would fight dropping down. Almost every game would matter in the last week of regular season; it wouldn't just be a few key match ups.

Tourney seeding could be worked out. Lord knows it couldn't be worse than the five days of the Big East.

-jk

[Matches]

Love it or hate it, expansion happened and it's here to stay. The only way the ACC would ever revert back to an 8-9 team league is if a bunch of schools (perhaps the Southern ones) left en masse and joined some other league. And even then the ACC probably would look to replace them.

The double-RR is gone, and anything short of that will produce incongruous RS standings. With those things as givens, 18 games isn't a big improvement over 16. And divisions just drive me nuts.

[pfrduke]

Sheesh! It's only been two months since we last visited this topic, but that won't discourage me from reposting:

Split the ACC into two divisions, Upper and Lower. Each team plays a double round robin within division (10 games) and single games across division (six games), and maybe an extra game or two across divisions (call it the Duke-UNC rule).

Leads to killer SOS in the Upper division, and lots of great TV match-ups, and the chance for a strong Lower division team to really stand out.

At the end of the season, the top four teams in the Upper division stay Upper and the bottom four teams in Lower stay Lower. The bottom two teams in Upper swap divisions with the top two teams in Lower.

The middle of the pack battles in both divisions would go down to the the end of the season. No one near the bottom of Lower would coast down the stretch if they had a chance to move to Upper, and the middle of the Upper would fight dropping down. Almost every game would matter in the last week of regular season; it wouldn't just be a few key match ups.

Tourney seeding could be worked out. Lord knows it couldn't be worse than the five days of the Big East.

-jk

I like the concept, but have two overarching observations.

First, what (if any) are the stakes of being in "Upper" or "Lower" other than playing the teams in your same division more often (and, perhaps, avoiding the name stigma that comes with finishing in Lower)? For example, would you limit tournament eligibility to the teams in Upper (and, maybe, the teams in Lower whose finish would move them into Upper the next season)? Give Upper teams more home games? Without real stakes involved, I'm not sure why getting into Upper or Lower would matter much to any of the teams.

Second, the season-to-season consistency is not high enough to guarantee that teams slotted into Upper based on the prior year's performance would generate great SOS or matchups against one another. Merely as an example, if the 2010 results had been used to slot Upper and Lower for 2011, both Wake and Maryland would have been included in Upper. I don't think anyone putting together a list of the league's top 6 teams in last year's preseason would have included Wake (and, it turns out, for good reason). In a sport that has as much fluidity of talent arriving and departing as college basketball, splitting divisions based on prior results doesn't guarantee a grouping of the best 6 teams for the next year.