The media is in love with the ACC. You can’t watch SportsCenter between September and March without hearing about North Carolina. You can’t turn on the television without seeing a Duke game. You can’t view an online sports site without reading about the greatness of Wake Forest.
I don’t know about you, but I’m really sick of it. It doesn’t matter if UCLA and Arizona State just played a triple-overtime game, Oklahoma beat Baylor with a half-court buzzer-beater, and Stephen Curry set an NCAA scoring record. If that same night, Duke beat East Lansing Dental College by 40, guess which story ESPN leads with? You got it, the Blue Devils.
And don’t get me started on Dick Vitale. Dickie V, the voice of college basketball, is such an ACC homer that he loses credibility with every other conference. I have yet to see him in any context where he hasn’t found someway of working ACC basketball into the conversation. Last year he was interviewed on SportsCenter prior to the World Series. When asked for his thoughts on the Rays and the Phillies, he somehow, someway, found a way of mentioning his two true loves: Duke and North Carolina. Disgusting, really.
However, despite what Vitale, and Billy Packer, and the rest of East Coast-biased media may have you believe, the ACC isn’t God’s gift to basketball. In fact, they’re not nearly as good as their fans would have you believe, and here’s why:
5. The Hype – Teams in the ACC are over-hyped, to the point where all of their fans and even players buy into it. All they hear from the media is how great they are, how dominating their players are, and how they’re the favorites to win it all. Yet despite being the “favorites” they don’t win the National Title every year. Why? Over-confidence. You can see it in the players’ faces. They don’t respect their competition. They expect to win because of the name on the front of their shirts, not because they’re really the better team.
4. Lack of Depth – The ACC is top heavy, much more so than any other major conference. Much as I hate to, I have to admit, Duke and North Carolina are perennial powers. Wake Forest has a good team about once every four years, and occasionally one of the other teams steps out of the shadows for a season or two, but overall, the rest of the conference is a joke. Clemson pulls the same act every year, they look great in the non-con, mostly due to weak schedule, and then they proceed to show their true colors in conference play, ending the season in fifth or sixth place in the ACC, which may or may not get them invited to the Big Dance. Outside of the top three or four teams, the conference really has nothing. Sure Maryland won a National Title in 2002, but what have they done lately? Virginia Tech, NC State, Miami? That’s like a who’s-who of also-rans. Not since Jesus fed the masses, has so little fed so many.
3. Coaching – The ACC has some hall-of-fame coaches, but let’s be honest: they’re old men. They get top-notch recruits based on past reputations, but their coaching strategies are no longer cutting edge. Mike Krzyzewski may have changed the way teams looked at offense, but the game has passed him by. Schemes he utilized in the past aren’t as effective as they used to be, primarily because opponents have seen all of his tricks before. The same can be said of Roy “What’s a Timeout?” Williams. Roy may be the best regular season coach in history, but there’s a reason why he has only won one National Title: when the competition stiffens up in March, he simply gets out-coached. As for Gary Williams at Maryland, he’s spectacularly mediocre. Sure, he won a national championship on a team loaded with NBA players, but I don’t think anyone’s rushing to include him in the list of all-time greats. The rest of league, well, I doubt your average sports fan could name more than a pair of them.
2. Defense – This is a foreign concept in the ACC. They’ve got teams with explosive offenses that can put up 100 points on a regular basis, but the same teams give up 80+ every night. Defense is not stressed in this conference and it shows. ACC teams are especially weak on the perimeter, and when faced with a hot guard, things generally don’t end well. Case in point, when Duke lost at Michigan, they surrendered 31 combined points to Zack Novak and Manny Harris. Think it’s just the Blue Devils? Guess again. Every loss by one of the top teams in the ACC (Wake, NC and Clemson) has been accompanied by a strong performance by an opposing guard.
1. Toughness – Soft. That’s how I would describe virtually every team in the ACC. Year-in, year-out, 
this is one of their hallmarks. Whenever a finesse team from the ACC runs into a bruising team that can play defense and will bang down low, they have trouble. Surely everyone reading this article remembers the absolute beat down freshman Cole Aldrich put on Tyler Hansbrough in the Final Four last spring. Why? Because Hansbrough, Psycho T moniker aside, is soft. Just because you run around with your eyes bugging out of your head doesn’t make you a tough player. And let’s face it, he got owned by Aldrich. That big corn-fed Minnesotan shook the Player of the Year down for his lunch money, and there wasn’t a thing Hansbrough, or any of his equally soft teammates could do about it. It’s ingrained in the fabric of the league.
Overall, I don’t really understand the hype surrounding the ACC. The Big East is clearly the toughest conference in men’s basketball this year, yet for some reason, even they don’t get the love that the ACC gets. It’s ridiculous, it’s un-earned, and quite frankly, it’s insulting to every other team in the country. The sports media has an ACC-addiction, and it’s time for the rest of us to stage an intervention. It’s our only hope for a better tomorrow.
