2008 Woodie Awards
Ladd on Sports: ACC basketball continues to reign supreme
Issue date: 3/18/05 Section: Sports
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Gone are the days when players stayed in college for four years. Now, if a top star doesn't choose to bypass college basketball completely, it's a rarity if he stays past his sophomore season.
The doom prophets have been lining up everywhere possible to proclaim the imminent demise of NCAA basketball. With the best young players foregoing it, the Nostradamus wanna-bes shout, there is no way the sport can survive.
Granted, the 2004-05 NCAA season would've been better if it had included superstars like LeBron James and Dwight Howard. But if you think that college basketball is dead or on life support because of their absence, then you need to look no further than the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) to see just how unreliable these clairvoyants' tea leaves are.
This past Sunday, Duke defeated Georgia Tech for its unprecedented sixth ACC Tournament title in the past seven years.
The Blue Devils' were rewarded with a number one seed in the NCAA Tournament, which tips off this week. North Carolina, Wake Forest, North Carolina State, and Georgia Tech will join Duke as ACC representatives in the Tournament. UNC will be a one seed as well, and Wake Forest will be a two.
The 2005 incarnation of March Madness could very well be like most others in recent memory: another chance for the ACC to flex its muscles and assert its dominance.
Since 1988, only two Final Fours have been played without an ACC representative. In that same time period, the ACC has had two teams make it to the final weekend of the NCAA Tournament four times.
Most importantly, ACC teams have won five championships in that time frame. No other conference has won more than three.
This year, a vast majority of pundits have UNC and Duke reaching the Final Four. Quite a few believe that Wake Forest will join them.
But the ACC mystique goes far beyond championships, Final Four appearances, and NCAA Tournament bids. ACC basketball is an intangible, almost ephemeral force that permeates the hearts and minds of people up and down the East Coast, and even throughout the nation.
In North Carolina, where college basketball is practically a religion, Duke, NC State, UNC, and Wake Forest provide passionate fan rivalries throughout the state.
Worker productivity dramatically decreases during the ACC Tournament. The announcement of the NCAA brackets are awaited throughout ACC country with the kind of anticipation that accompanies the impending birth of a child.
The names of past greats echo throughout the lore of the conference. Depending upon what part of the state you are in, names like David Thompson, Dean Smith, Christian Laettner, and Billy Packer will either bring a warm smile, or a string of profanities.
Grey areas between love and hate are rare in the hearts of these schools' fans. Those whose hearts are open to loving more than one of these four schools are typically ostracized and viewed as pariahs by the diehard fans of particular teams.
This holds especially true when talking about the rivalry between UNC and Duke. It is impossible to discuss ACC basketball without bringing up the greatest rivalry in college basketball.
UNC and Duke have been involved in enough recruiting battles, tightly contested games, and conference championship match-ups to accrue an acrimony equal to that between the Yankees and the Red Sox.
However, instead of being separated by the distance between Boston and New York, imagine Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park only being a little more than 10 miles away from each other. That's what you have with Duke and UNC, and their respective homes in Durham and Chapel Hill.
On the day of games between the two rivals, both cities are known to shut down. Bonfires are not atypical on the home campus of the winner.
That's just for regular season games. It cranks up several notches when they meet in the ACC tournament. The intensity and anticipation blankets the two cities, increasing exponentially in the hours proceeding tip-off.
Remember, these two campuses are separated by less than a 20-minute drive. There's a lot of crossover between the fans. Because of that, particularly high stakes games between the two schools can lead to silent, nerve wracking family dinners and strained romantic relationships.
This is not just something I know from secondhand accounts. As a lifelong, diehard, Carolina fan, I'm speaking from personal experience.
