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