Atlantic Coast Conference (conference rank: 2nd)
March 7-11
All games at Brooklyn, N.Y.
kPOY: John Collins, Wake Forest
Regular season champ: North Carolina (preseason #5 / 1st ACC, current #4)
Overachiever: Wake Forest (preseason #76, current #30)
Underachiever: N.C. State (preseason #35, current #100)
The ACC makes its debut in Brooklyn this week. It appears that eight teams have at-large bids lined up with Wake Forest and Syracuse needing to do a little work to feel safe when the bracket is leaked on Sunday.
There is a lot of parity at the top of the conference with not much separating North Carolina, Louisville, Virginia and to some extent Duke and Miami. The bottom of the conference – not so much – as Boston College and N.C. State have drifted away from the gravitational center of the league.
This sort of distribution figures to be typical for good conferences. There is a theoretical limit to how great a college basketball team can be. So it’s tough for great teams to achieve much separation from other great teams. However, there’s no limit to how bad a team can be! So I suspect you’re marginally more likely to find teams with poor conference records in great conferences and great conference records in bad conferences.
At any rate, there are no winless teams in the ACC this season, although Boston College’s last conference win was a long time ago. The Eagles come into the tournament on a 14-game losing streak.
Rd1 Qtrs Semis Final Champ 1 North Carolina 100 100 76.0 42.4 25.9 4 Louisville 100 100 62.9 34.0 20.0 6 Virginia 100 83.4 55.0 35.6 19.1 2 Florida St. 100 100 67.7 33.0 14.1 5 Duke 100 73.9 31.3 14.6 7.7 3 Notre Dame 100 100 40.7 19.3 6.8 10 Wake Forest 87.8 51.4 18.7 7.0 2.1 9 Miami FL 100 56.6 15.2 5.0 1.9 7 Virginia Tech 100 46.4 13.4 4.1 1.0 8 Syracuse 100 43.4 8.8 2.3 0.7 12 Clemson 72.1 22.4 5.5 1.6 0.5 14 Pittsburgh 52.9 9.4 2.6 0.6 0.09 11 Georgia Tech 47.1 7.1 1.7 0.4 0.05 13 North Carolina St. 27.9 3.6 0.3 0.04 0.009 15 Boston College 12.2 2.2 0.2 0.01 <.001