I’m using my ratings and Bill James’ log5 formula to estimate the chances of each participating team advancing to a particular round of its conference tournament.

Atlantic Coast Conference
Location: Greensboro, N.C. (Greensboro Coliseum)
Dates: March 12-16
Chance of bid thief: 6 percent
Current kPOY: Jabari Parker, Duke

Projections:

                  Rd1   Qtrs  Semis  Final  Champ
 1 Virginia       100    100   77.4   54.1   33.1
 3 Duke           100    100   80.2   49.5   26.9
 2 Syracuse       100    100   77.8   38.9   18.9
 4 North Carolina 100    100   55.3   20.7    8.6
 5 Pitt           100   78.2   39.8   15.2    6.5
 9 Florida St.    100   52.2   12.2    5.1    1.7
 6 Clemson        100   70.7   16.5    5.7    1.6
 8 Maryland       100   47.8   10.4    4.1    1.3
10 Miami FL      80.0   43.7   10.8    2.8    0.7
 7 N.C. State     100   51.6   11.0    2.5    0.5
13 Notre Dame    57.8   13.9    3.4    0.6    0.1
11 Georgia Tech  56.0   17.6    2.2    0.4    0.07
12 Wake Forest   42.2    7.9    1.5    0.2    0.03
14 Boston Coll.  44.0   11.7    1.1    0.2    0.02
15 Virginia Tech 20.0    4.6    0.4    0.03   0.002

The ACC tournament will stretch to five days for the first time in the conference’s history. Virginia is the favorite here, but I’m not including any proximity bonus for the teams located in North Carolina and it might be worth taking that into account. And most other predictive systems are higher on Duke than Virginia anyway, so maybe I wouldn’t stake too much on Virginia being the pick here. Nonetheless, this tourney is basically a five-team race.

There’s not a whole lot of bid drama in Greensboro. The top five seeds appear to be safe and everyone below that appears to need the automatic bid. Really, what are the fun stories here? I can’t really find one. Maybe I have just run out of gas from writing these previews. Virginia Tech has an opening day game with Miami and could get a third win over the Hurricanes while going 0-17 against the rest of the ACC. I guess that would be something interesting to tell your grandkids about when they put too much emphasis on head-to-head results someday.