Who is ready for #11 vs #14 and #12 vs #13 on Wednesday night?
The ACC meetings at Amelia Island have proven to be far less exciting than we all hoped with the "FSU wants to leave for the Big 12" talk. So far the only two items of note is an expansion of the ACC Tournament and the football regular season schedule.
ACC commissioner John Swofford announced that with the addition of Pittsburgh and Syracuse, the ACC Tournament will include all fourteen league teams. That will necessitate the addition of a Wednesday round of games involving the bottom four teams in the ACC. The winners of the #11 vs #14 and #12 vs #13 games would advance to play the #5 and #6 seeds respectively on Thursday. Needless to say the excitement is more than I can bear. After all we know just how good the Thursday games have been, adding games on Wednesday will have us all taking the week off from work simply to take it all in. /sarcasm
Unfortunately this is what expansion has wrought. I imagine part of the new TV deal with ESPN included two more ACC Tournament games plus the Big East tried excluding teams from their behemoth of a league tourney and it did not go over all. Never mind the fact all this does is create two more bad games which could see fewer people in the Greensboro Coliseum than a UNCG home game. The ACC is struggling with a lack of good teams past the top three or four making anything that happens in the tournament before those teams get on the floor dicey at best.
On the football side, the ACC schedule will move to nine games with Atlantic Dvision hosting five home games in odd years and the Coastal Division doing so in even years. It will be interesting to see how this impacts scheduling. Schools, in general, are not going to give up the lighter portions of their schedule meaning the additional league game has the potential of removing a quality non-conference game from respective teams' slates.