8/3/03 - Visionary

The ACC torched its reputation in heated pursuit of Big East football machines and bigger bowl paydays. Now that the petroleum clouds have lifted, now that Miami and Virginia Tech have signed on for the 2004 season, the league might spend a little more time repairing its image and remembering its basketball base.

Expansion fever, clinically known as West Vile Virus, has subsided while the NCAA considers allowing football title games for leagues with fewer than 12 teams and the breathless ACC ponders where to turn for an eventual 12th member. Notre Dame and Penn State loom as long shots. Boston College and Syracuse still reel from 11:59 rejection. Florida and Kentucky look like pipe dreams.

Back home, the damage-control wagons have circled the basketball arena. Stung by criticism from faceless outsiders and privileged insider Mike Krzyzewski, the ACC office is exploring ways to preserve a round-robin schedule.

During the institutional recruiting circus, expansion proponents insisted that they had devised suitable models for basketball divisions and had resigned themselves to the inevitable end of complete home-and-home schedules.

Doubletalk about the cost of progress might satisfy some transient careerists running ACC schools or athletics departments, but the jive sounded foreign to donors raised on basketball emotions. Big Four fans, livid over the possibility of single shots at their rivals, expressed displeasure during spring fund-raising forays.

Although the school presidents snagged only two new members, which mangled the division models, people assumed that the ACC would still shrink the conference basketball schedule.

One reason: Many coaches loathe the prospect of 18 league games (the number if only Miami had joined) and couldn't fathom extending the marathon to 20 games.

But, Commissioner John Swofford says, folks shouldn't jump to conclusions just yet because the ACC hasn't discounted the possibility. Wake Forest's Skip Prosser reports that the coaches are discussing the 20-game option.

'Without question, that would be the most equitable way of picking the champion,' Prosser said. 'Last year, when we won the regular-season championship, we could say: 'Hey, we won the regular-season championship.' Everybody had to go to Cameron, come to Wake, go to the Dean Dome. Everybody played everybody. One of the things I think is endearing about the ACC is that the schedule was pure. You played everybody home and home. You didn't play anybody twice until you played everybody once. It's so symmetrical. It's the way it should be.'

Conference games require greater physical, emotional and cerebral investments. The notion of jumping from 16 such events to 20 exhausts some coaches, especially those who would prefer fewer hot spots and more soft spots, sometimes known as scheduled wins.

Right after the ACC presidents dumped the Syracuse-BC pairing and plucked Virginia Tech off the discard pile, Commissioner Swofford trumpeted the Big Ten as a league that makes 11 teams work. That conference plays only 16 league games. Wisconsin won by one game last winter. The Badgers didn't travel to Indiana or Michigan and didn't play at home against Ohio State or Purdue.

The Big Ten rotates the omitted teams on every schedule every winter. Natural rivals Purdue and Indiana had to schedule an extra game that didn't count to complete their usual home-and-home arrangement.

Unappealing ACC parallels prompted the league to consider a full schedule. TV programmers might recoil at any hint of dropping a Duke-North Carolina or Duke-Maryland game. Wake Forest contributors might stew over a home schedule that omits Duke or Carolina, more likely if the league adds a 12th team and goes to divisions.

Schedule integrity

'I'm no ACC historian,' Prosser said, 'but I'm guessing if Duke and Carolina were playing only one time, there would be a hue and cry. The other thing is, if we can't have a pure rotation like the Big Ten because of TV or ancient rivalries, well, then let's come up with everybody's two natural rivalries. I don't think Solomon could figure that one out.'

In all its wisdom, the Big 12 uses football divisions to formulate a basketball schedule but keeps standings without divisions. Teams from the South (four Texas schools and two Oklahoma schools) play each other twice and play North schools once, for a total of 16 league games. Arguments often arise. Last winter, Kansas finished one game ahead of Texas, largely on the basis of its home win over the Longhorns. Kansas didn't travel to Texas.

'When I was at Xavier and we went to divisions in the Atlantic 10, Temple was in the other division,' Prosser said. 'If that's the year you have Temple at home rather than in Philly, you have a better chance to win your division. It's a reality. From a purist's standpoint, 20 games would maintain the integrity of the schedule and would make the ACC unique for a league of this size. Certainly, it does have an appeal to basketball coaches. There's a negative: It kind of limits what you can do with your out-of-conference schedule, but I don't think it's an impossible task to still play your national games and play a suitable number of home games.'

Next season, Wake Forest will play someone (tentatively Alabama) in the Coaches Versus Cancer doubleheader at Madison Square Garden and Indiana at home in the ACC-Big Ten series. The other non-conference games: Texas, Yale and Southern Methodist on the road -- Cincinnati, Richmond, Elon, New Mexico and two low-octane teams at home. If the ACC had 20 league games instead of 16, Prosser would have to drop four outside games.

'I still think there could be enough flexibility that you can schedule enough nonconference games,' Prosser said. 'I also think it would probably be in place for only a year, perhaps. I'm out of the expansion prognostication business, but it likely would be a one-year proposition at best. Who knows? If we have 12 teams, then I think a 22-game schedule would be untenable. You're not going to have 22 league games. People just have to understand that. The divisions will be another issue. Until we have the divisions, until we have the 12th team, then the 20-game schedule is worth talking about.'

In August, with practice two months away, reasonable conversations might rescue part of the ACC's basketball tradition, if only for one last roundup.