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The Polish Nightmare

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Can't answer a tough sports question? Just say parity**

Anyone who has been watching Atlantic Coast Conference basketball this year is certainly familiar with this season's new catch-phrase: parity.

Parity is supposed to make the race for the ACC regular-season championship a closer race than it has ever been before. Because of parity we are supposed to see every ACC game this year go down to the wire and a set of ACC final standings where no team is better than 10-6 and no team worse than 6-10.

Sounds exciting, but unfortunately, this will never happen because there is no such thing as parity. Parity is a term that was made up by sportswriters so that we would have something to use as an excuse when we don't know the answer to a sports question. Sorry to ruin things for you, but that's the truth.

The fact is that it was hard to tell before the season what would happen in the ACC this year. Would Wake Forest's Tim Duncan really stand up and become the best player in the country? Would Georgia Tech's Stephon Marbury become as good as everyone was thinking he might? How much does Coach K mean to Duke?

So Will, who looks good in the Filipino billiards league?

That's a tough one. It could be anyone, there is quite a bit of parity in the Philippines this year.

Parity is purely fictional. It occurs about as often as someone getting an A in Orgo. I'm not even sure if parity is in the dictionary. But then again, I'm a senior and I haven't opened a book all year.

The idea of parity becomes a substitute for putting down our predictions in print. If we actually had to make guess and write them down, someone would bring it back to us a few months later and make fun of us when we were wrong. Luckily, I do not possess the common sense of most sportswriters and will make my predictions right now.

Someone will runaway with the league title, or at the very best, it will come down to two teams. My guess is that Tim Duncan is the real thing and Wake Forest will win the title with at least a 13-3 record, but it will probably win all but one or two games. North Carolina is good, but not quite as good. Georgia Tech looks great now, but sooner or later the players will start listening to head coach Bobby Cremins and everything will go downhill from there.

Some people will point to last year when Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland and Wake Forest tied for first place at 12-4. But that's not parity. It's simply a tie. Ninth-place Duke went 0-9 against those teams, eighth-place North Carolina State went 1-7 against those teams by getting a win over North Carolina. That's not parity, that's an old-fashioned butt-whipping. Every once in a while three or four teams will have similar talent, but never will you find a league where nine teams will play on the same level.

It's true that on any given night, any team can beat any other team. It's called an upset. That's why we have the term upset. It means that a lesser team won a game over a better team that it generally wouldn't beat. It doesn't mean that they would win half the time they played.

It's impossible for nine teams to have similar abilities in player talent, coaching ability and dumb luck. Once again this year there will be two or three teams who wouldn't be able to win a game unless they played each other, there will be two or three teams who will vie for the league title and there will be a couple of teams who fall somewhere in the middle.

So the next time you read about how much parity there is in the ACC, remember that you heard it here first. There is no such thing. It does not exist. It has the same level of BS as that last English paper I wrote.

William Dvoranchik is a Trinity senior and associate sports editor of The Chronicle. He expects 100 people to mail him this article after everyone in the ACC ends up tied at 8-8.