Selection Sunday is on the horizon, and in ACC Country March Madness begins with the conference tournament that started it all. As teams have just a few more days to jockey for favorable seeds or one of the last spots on the bubble, we’ll take a look at the most interesting and important happenings around the league that made college hoops a national phenomenon.
NEW YORK STATE OF MIND: Holding the ACC Tournament in Brooklyn is a divisive issue. There are plenty, especially on Tobacco Road, who believe the tourney should never leave Greensboro, N.C. Others think a rotation that includes Greensboro and Charlotte with a little Atlanta and Washington DC mixed in would be fine.
Still others are of the opinion that the exposure in New York is well worth making a few more fans travel. Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim falls into the final category. He’s made it clear he’s not a fan of the event in Greensboro, and the ACC Tournament has not be kind to the Orange, who entered the 2018 event having never won a game.
But hey, this is already shaping up to be the best ACC Tournament for Syracuse. Boeheim doesn’t have to complain about a perceived lack of good restaurant options and his team actually gets to stay for more than one day after taking out Wake Forest in the opening round.
Of course, the fact the Orange were playing on Tuesday wasn’t a great sign for the state of the program that has once again found itself on the NCAA Tournament bubble. Beating a Wake team with a losing record doesn’t do much to enhance the resume and Syracuse likely entered Wednesday needing to beat defending NCAA champion North Carolina to get into the field of 68.
“We just are going to keep playing,” Boeheim said Tuesday when asked about the NCAA Tournament. “We had a great strength of schedule this year, much better than last year. We didn’t win on the road last year; we won on the road this year. So we’ve done some good things. There’s a lot of teams that look good. It’s just one of those things that’s going to be tough decisions. The committee is just going to — they’re going to make whatever decision they make, and we’re just going to try to play the best we can. And I think we’ve got a good basketball team, and I think we can compete, and we’ve proven that we can compete with anybody.”
That might all be true, but for a program that has multiple Final Fours to hang its hat on, Cuse finds itself in this position far too often.