While the ACC saw its giant fall last week, the conference race is a tight one, featuring five one-loss teams and another six teams with just two losses.
Top-to-bottom the conference may not be as bad as most people think, though, as evidenced by the Yellow Jackets' shellacking of the Tar Heels. While Harrison Barnes may not quite be living up to the hype (no twenty-point games this season), Boston College guard Reggie Jackson and Georgia Tech guard Iman Shumpert have greatly exceeded expectations for their teams this season.
In ESPN’s college basketball expert Joe Lunardi’s Monday edition of bracketology, he predicted that the ACC will send five teams to the Big Dance in March. That would tie the league with the SEC for the fourth-most of any conference behind the Big East’s 11, and Big Ten and Big 12 with six each. While experts are quick to deem this a terrible season for the ACC (See Jay Bilas’ column from two weeks ago entitled “The ACC is undeniably down this season), I think we should reserve judgment.
First of all, there’s no way the Big East will ultimately receive 11 bids. Sure, Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Villanova and Connecticut all are essentially locks to play in March, but when all is said and done it is likely that teams such as Notre Dame, Georgetown, Louisville, St.John’s, Cincinnati, West Virginia, UCF and Marquette will beat up on each other. Many of these teams are inexperienced and untested, and conference play in the Big East is a long, difficult road. The Big East got eight teams in last year, and this year we should expect a similar number.
There is no dispute that the Big East is the strongest conference this year, but the ACC is not far behind the Big Ten or Big 12. The experts panic that the ACC only has one ranked team, yet as of Tuesday, nine of the league’s twelve teams are at least five games over .500. The Big 12 has 10 of 12 teams boasting records of at least five games over .500, while the Big Ten has seven of its 11 teams meeting this criteria.
All it takes is for one hot streak for any of those top nine teams to jump into the rankings. My message to experts: Don’t abandon ship just yet, there still is a lot of talent in the conference.
Take Florida State for example. Everyone saw what they did to Duke defensively. With athletes like Chris Singleton, Derwin Kitchen and Xavier Gibson, they clogged the paint and forced the Blue Devils to settle for jumpers. The Seminoles allow just 61.4 points-per-game, the third fewest points allowed in the conference. This impressive statistic includes holding No. 1 Duke to 61 points, No. 15 Baylor to 61 points, No. 2 Ohio State to 58 points and No. 14 Florida to just 55 points. Leonard Hamilton has his team playing great defense against some of the top teams in the country and if it can keep this up, they should finish in the upper echelon of the ACC and receive a March Madness bid for its third straight season.
Another team with a chance to make a late season run is Maryland. In Eamonn Brennan’s latest column, he argues that the Terrapins are the second-best team in the conference even though Lunardi omits them from his latest bracket projection. Brennan cites Ken Pomeroy’s defensive efficiency rankings as a big reason for his bold statement. Maryland ranks first in Pomeroy’s defensive efficiency rankings, even though they have failed as of yet to lock up any momentous wins. After holding leads in the second half of difficult away games facing No. 1 Duke and No. 7 Villanova, the Terrapins fell apart down the stretch and came away with two losses. With four consecutive winnable games upcoming for Maryland, Gary Williams and Jordan Williams hope to lead the team to a 15-6 record.
I'll leave you with some games to keep an eye on in conference play this week. Tonight at 9 p.m., Florida State takes on in-state rival Miami in what should be a good game between two teams looking to bolster their cases for NCAA Tournament bids. Thursday night at 9 p.m., streaking Virginia Tech, which has won seven of its last eight contests, travels to College Park to battle the Terrapins who are hosts their first game in over two weeks.
In both games, you should see teams play good basketball, from a league that is not as bad as some might say.
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