Death of the ACC Tournament?
posted by LW, Tuesday, March 16, 2010
The ACC Tournament ended two days ago, and now the focus is squarely on the madness that will commence Thursday.
But I do want to weigh in a bit on what unfolded over four days at Greensboro Coliseum.
Some folks, such as Ron Morris of The State, saw enough to pronounce the venerable old tournament dead.
The once-proud tournament - the granddaddy of 'em all - has been reduced to this: Scalpers outside the coliseum Thursday before the first round were taking $5 for a ticket to the opening session. Face value was $72.
The league has rendered the tournament meaningless, its appeal lost in an effort to make football a viable sport on the national scene. A tournament that once served as the social and sports epicenter of peoples' lives now cannot draw a full house for a single game.
"It all went down the drain with expansion," says Bucky Waters, who participated in the ACC tournament as a player from 1956-58 at N.C. State, served as the coach at Duke for four more tournaments, and has followed them since as a TV commentator.
"Expansion really changed the culture of basketball, and not for the better," Waters says. "Duke and North Carolina fought it. It was done for football. It is what it is."
As I left Greensboro Coliseum a little after 1 a.m. Friday morning after writing about Clemson's early exit from the tournament, I briefly considered returning to watch Friday's four games.
Briefly.
The docket read like this: Duke vs. Virginia, Virginia Tech vs. Miami, Maryland vs. Georgia Tech, Florida State vs. N.C. State.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzz.
As it turned out, all four games were pretty compelling from a competitive standpoint. But that's not exactly the kind of lineup that once made Quarterfinal Friday at the ACC Tournament so special -- and helped make the tournament itself such a must-see event.
I'm not convinced the tournament is dead. The alarming number of empty seats this year were in part a result of North Carolina's plummet from national title winner to NIT-picker.
I am, however, convinced that this whole 96-team NCAA Tournament idea will administer the death blow.
Coaches are fueling this ill-conceived expansion movement, and it would be interesting to know how ACC coaches who revere the conference tournament reconcile their support with the almost-certain destruction of something they hold so dear.
This thought seems to have occurred to Mike Krzyzewski, who has beaten the drum for a bigger NCAA field.
In this column by Ed Hardin of the Greensboro paper, Coach K preaches some restraint.
Krzyzewski said Sunday if the NCAA decides to go to a sprawling tournament next season, it could mean the end of the ACC tournament as we know it.
"Although I'm not opposed to expansion I'd like to crawl with it, if we're going to do it, to 68 or 72 (bids)," he said.
Lenox Rawlings of the Winston-Salem Journal proposes expanding Reynolds Coliseum and moving the tournament there. It'll never happen, as Rawlings concedes, but it's a great idea.
These other buildings and other cities aren't really working out. Or maybe contemporary ACC basketball isn't captivating hearts and minds like it once did.
During the first round at the Greensboro Coliseum Thursday, there were so many empty green seats upstairs that the lime glare had the same blinding effect as an Alaskan blizzard. It looked like St. Patrick's Day all over again, without Celtics or beer.
That sometimes happens in the opening weekday afternoon game with Clemson as the hottest commodity. This year, the box score reported attendance of 23,381, but the arena remained less than half full through the second game, Wake Forest's blowout loss to Miami.
Fans could buy tickets on the street for $5 or on eBay for $7. A veteran resale-market ticket specialist, once stereotyped as a scalper, said that he had bought 40 upstairs tickets for $40. Face value: $72 each. Without any customers, he took them home.
"This thing is over," he said.
He didn't mean that Duke will roll. He meant that the ACC Tournament is over as a pulsating, must-see event.
Ouch.
Barry Jacobs of The ACC Sports Journal writes about the quality of play -- or lack thereof -- in this year's ACC Tournament.
Fourteen of 22 teams committed more turnovers than they recorded assists, led by finals contestant Georgia Tech, a talented, determined group that displays only a nodding acquaintance with ball security. The Yellow Jackets had a negative assist-turnover ratio in each of the four games they played at the Greensboro Coliseum. That was nothing new – Paul Hewitt’s club averaged 2.2 more turnovers than assists in games this season.
“It’s not a game of perfection,” Hewitt said. “It’s a game of trying, learning.”
Turnovers weren’t the only offensive shortcoming evident in Greensboro. Overall, teams combined for 41.2 percent field goal shooting accuracy, worst in the 57-year history of the ACC tournament. The average scoring output per game was 123.4 points, worst of the shot clock era.
The Duke-Virginia quarterfinals produced the fewest points in a quarter-century for a tournament game (103). The Duke-Georgia Tech finals yielded the lowest combined score since 1997.
In other words, the tournament was the ACC's regular season in perfect microcosm. Had to be a record number of games in which the winning team shot less than 35 percent.
You can say the conference teams played great defense, but that argument didn't exactly work for ACC football in the offensively-challenged years from 2005 to 2008.
The Greenville News has a lengthy piece on Clemson and South Carolina spending boatloads of money on sports.
Nothing really earth-shattering to the revelation that athletics departments are spending more -- largely because they're making more -- but I guess it becomes a bigger story when the universities are slashing left and right to try to adjust to the dire economic times.
The most interesting item from the story: Clemson's athletics department received almost $2.9 million in tuition breaks for out-of-state athletes during the 2008-09 academic year.
Maybe this provides some context for the $2.7 million check the athletics department cut to the university last year.
South Carolina, by the way, provides no tuition breaks for its out-of-state athletes. Then again, tuition is a lot higher at Clemson.
Jim Leavitt is proceeding with his wrongful-termination lawsuit against South Florida.
Speaking of South Florida, former Clemson assistant David Blackwell was one of the casualties in the Leavitt fiasco. New coach Skip Holtz didn't retain him (maybe he was still bitter about that 63-17 thing). And after an expected opportunity at Michigan fell through, Blackwell is still looking for work.
Gotta think Blackwell is second-guessing his decision to leave Clemson for Tampa a year ago.
Pete Iacobelli of AP says Trevor Booker is ready for his final chance at winning an NCAA game.
"It'll be real big. We haven't gotten that win yet," Booker said. "Just to get one win, it'll be a big chip off my shoulder."
Travis Sawchik of The Post and Courier says the Tigers are anticipating a high-octane matchup.
Missouri coach Mike Anderson will have the advantage of past NCAA Tournament success when the Tigers face the Tigers on Friday.
Clemson, in case you haven't heard, hasn't won an NCAA game since 1997.
Anderson, his team last season ending a six-year NCAA Tournament hiatus at Mizzou, is 3-1 as the Tigers’ head coach in NCAA Tournament play after 2009’s Elite Eight run.
Before replacing Snyder, Anderson took Alabama-Birmingham to the NCAA Tournament in 2004-06. He was 2-1 in the first round and 3-3 overall, with Anderson’s 2004 team beating Washington and Kentucky as a No. 9 seed before losing to Kansas 100-74 in St. Louis.
Anderson sees that combined NCAA Tournament success as testament to staying the course.
“We just continue to build on the things that we’ve done all year long,” Anderson said.
Meaning the 10th-seeded Tigers will try to keep the game fast and furious when they take the court against Clemson on Friday in Buffalo, N.Y.
“Sometimes, a lot of people get to tournament play, and they change how they’re going to play,” Anderson said. “They get more conservative, I think.
“I want to be the opposite. I want our guys to turn up the intensity even more.”
More on Anderson's tournament success in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Anderson agrees with Krzyzewski that 96 teams are too much.
And in the Independent-Mail, Anderson talks about the differences between his breakneck approach and that of his mentor, Nolan Richardson.
“We’re fast, fun, exciting,” Anderson said. “We hang our hats on defense, and we win. If someone watched our team and said, ‘Hey, man, those look like the Arkansas teams in the ’90s that Nolan Richardson had, I take that as the ultimate compliment.”
Sure would be cool to see some of those games on one of the classic networks this week.
LW
Click here for the "Eye On The Tigers" blog archive.
Link to this entry - Discuss this entry - Return to Blog Home
The ACC Tournament ended two days ago, and now the focus is squarely on the madness that will commence Thursday.
But I do want to weigh in a bit on what unfolded over four days at Greensboro Coliseum.
Some folks, such as Ron Morris of The State, saw enough to pronounce the venerable old tournament dead.
The once-proud tournament - the granddaddy of 'em all - has been reduced to this: Scalpers outside the coliseum Thursday before the first round were taking $5 for a ticket to the opening session. Face value was $72.
The league has rendered the tournament meaningless, its appeal lost in an effort to make football a viable sport on the national scene. A tournament that once served as the social and sports epicenter of peoples' lives now cannot draw a full house for a single game.
"It all went down the drain with expansion," says Bucky Waters, who participated in the ACC tournament as a player from 1956-58 at N.C. State, served as the coach at Duke for four more tournaments, and has followed them since as a TV commentator.
"Expansion really changed the culture of basketball, and not for the better," Waters says. "Duke and North Carolina fought it. It was done for football. It is what it is."
As I left Greensboro Coliseum a little after 1 a.m. Friday morning after writing about Clemson's early exit from the tournament, I briefly considered returning to watch Friday's four games.
Briefly.
The docket read like this: Duke vs. Virginia, Virginia Tech vs. Miami, Maryland vs. Georgia Tech, Florida State vs. N.C. State.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzz.
As it turned out, all four games were pretty compelling from a competitive standpoint. But that's not exactly the kind of lineup that once made Quarterfinal Friday at the ACC Tournament so special -- and helped make the tournament itself such a must-see event.
I'm not convinced the tournament is dead. The alarming number of empty seats this year were in part a result of North Carolina's plummet from national title winner to NIT-picker.
I am, however, convinced that this whole 96-team NCAA Tournament idea will administer the death blow.
Coaches are fueling this ill-conceived expansion movement, and it would be interesting to know how ACC coaches who revere the conference tournament reconcile their support with the almost-certain destruction of something they hold so dear.
This thought seems to have occurred to Mike Krzyzewski, who has beaten the drum for a bigger NCAA field.
In this column by Ed Hardin of the Greensboro paper, Coach K preaches some restraint.
Krzyzewski said Sunday if the NCAA decides to go to a sprawling tournament next season, it could mean the end of the ACC tournament as we know it.
"Although I'm not opposed to expansion I'd like to crawl with it, if we're going to do it, to 68 or 72 (bids)," he said.
Lenox Rawlings of the Winston-Salem Journal proposes expanding Reynolds Coliseum and moving the tournament there. It'll never happen, as Rawlings concedes, but it's a great idea.
These other buildings and other cities aren't really working out. Or maybe contemporary ACC basketball isn't captivating hearts and minds like it once did.
During the first round at the Greensboro Coliseum Thursday, there were so many empty green seats upstairs that the lime glare had the same blinding effect as an Alaskan blizzard. It looked like St. Patrick's Day all over again, without Celtics or beer.
That sometimes happens in the opening weekday afternoon game with Clemson as the hottest commodity. This year, the box score reported attendance of 23,381, but the arena remained less than half full through the second game, Wake Forest's blowout loss to Miami.
Fans could buy tickets on the street for $5 or on eBay for $7. A veteran resale-market ticket specialist, once stereotyped as a scalper, said that he had bought 40 upstairs tickets for $40. Face value: $72 each. Without any customers, he took them home.
"This thing is over," he said.
He didn't mean that Duke will roll. He meant that the ACC Tournament is over as a pulsating, must-see event.
Ouch.
Barry Jacobs of The ACC Sports Journal writes about the quality of play -- or lack thereof -- in this year's ACC Tournament.
Fourteen of 22 teams committed more turnovers than they recorded assists, led by finals contestant Georgia Tech, a talented, determined group that displays only a nodding acquaintance with ball security. The Yellow Jackets had a negative assist-turnover ratio in each of the four games they played at the Greensboro Coliseum. That was nothing new – Paul Hewitt’s club averaged 2.2 more turnovers than assists in games this season.
“It’s not a game of perfection,” Hewitt said. “It’s a game of trying, learning.”
Turnovers weren’t the only offensive shortcoming evident in Greensboro. Overall, teams combined for 41.2 percent field goal shooting accuracy, worst in the 57-year history of the ACC tournament. The average scoring output per game was 123.4 points, worst of the shot clock era.
The Duke-Virginia quarterfinals produced the fewest points in a quarter-century for a tournament game (103). The Duke-Georgia Tech finals yielded the lowest combined score since 1997.
In other words, the tournament was the ACC's regular season in perfect microcosm. Had to be a record number of games in which the winning team shot less than 35 percent.
You can say the conference teams played great defense, but that argument didn't exactly work for ACC football in the offensively-challenged years from 2005 to 2008.
The Greenville News has a lengthy piece on Clemson and South Carolina spending boatloads of money on sports.
Nothing really earth-shattering to the revelation that athletics departments are spending more -- largely because they're making more -- but I guess it becomes a bigger story when the universities are slashing left and right to try to adjust to the dire economic times.
The most interesting item from the story: Clemson's athletics department received almost $2.9 million in tuition breaks for out-of-state athletes during the 2008-09 academic year.
Maybe this provides some context for the $2.7 million check the athletics department cut to the university last year.
South Carolina, by the way, provides no tuition breaks for its out-of-state athletes. Then again, tuition is a lot higher at Clemson.
Jim Leavitt is proceeding with his wrongful-termination lawsuit against South Florida.
Speaking of South Florida, former Clemson assistant David Blackwell was one of the casualties in the Leavitt fiasco. New coach Skip Holtz didn't retain him (maybe he was still bitter about that 63-17 thing). And after an expected opportunity at Michigan fell through, Blackwell is still looking for work.
Gotta think Blackwell is second-guessing his decision to leave Clemson for Tampa a year ago.
Pete Iacobelli of AP says Trevor Booker is ready for his final chance at winning an NCAA game.
"It'll be real big. We haven't gotten that win yet," Booker said. "Just to get one win, it'll be a big chip off my shoulder."
Travis Sawchik of The Post and Courier says the Tigers are anticipating a high-octane matchup.
Missouri coach Mike Anderson will have the advantage of past NCAA Tournament success when the Tigers face the Tigers on Friday.
Clemson, in case you haven't heard, hasn't won an NCAA game since 1997.
Anderson, his team last season ending a six-year NCAA Tournament hiatus at Mizzou, is 3-1 as the Tigers’ head coach in NCAA Tournament play after 2009’s Elite Eight run.
Before replacing Snyder, Anderson took Alabama-Birmingham to the NCAA Tournament in 2004-06. He was 2-1 in the first round and 3-3 overall, with Anderson’s 2004 team beating Washington and Kentucky as a No. 9 seed before losing to Kansas 100-74 in St. Louis.
Anderson sees that combined NCAA Tournament success as testament to staying the course.
“We just continue to build on the things that we’ve done all year long,” Anderson said.
Meaning the 10th-seeded Tigers will try to keep the game fast and furious when they take the court against Clemson on Friday in Buffalo, N.Y.
“Sometimes, a lot of people get to tournament play, and they change how they’re going to play,” Anderson said. “They get more conservative, I think.
“I want to be the opposite. I want our guys to turn up the intensity even more.”
More on Anderson's tournament success in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Anderson agrees with Krzyzewski that 96 teams are too much.
And in the Independent-Mail, Anderson talks about the differences between his breakneck approach and that of his mentor, Nolan Richardson.
“We’re fast, fun, exciting,” Anderson said. “We hang our hats on defense, and we win. If someone watched our team and said, ‘Hey, man, those look like the Arkansas teams in the ’90s that Nolan Richardson had, I take that as the ultimate compliment.”
Sure would be cool to see some of those games on one of the classic networks this week.
LW
Click here for the "Eye On The Tigers" blog archive.
Link to this entry - Discuss this entry - Return to Blog Home
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Larry Williams. Larry has covered the daily beat at Clemson since 2004. Williams, who worked for the Charleston Post & Courier from 2004-08, joined Tigerillustrated.com in November of 2008. He may be reached by email at ldubya08(at)gmail.com. Replace (at) with @.