From the sidelines
By Marty Gordon
The Southeastern Conference sent almost all of its members to the current March Madness Basketball Tournament. The Atlantic Coast Conference is represented by three.
Over the past 20 years, it was the ACC that dominated the postseason. All of that has changed.
The ACC desperately needs to re-establish itself as a strong basketball conference. In order to do that, there is only one solution—the ACC should merge with the Big East basketball schools to form a mega-powerful conference.
While the ACC is finding it harder and harder to battle with the Southeastern Conference in football, they can reclaim the gold in basketball.
For years, the ACC was known as a powerful basketball one with the likes of North Carolina, Duke and N.C. State.
Let’s step back in time for a moment.
The Big East Conference was a collegiate athletics conference that consisted of as many as 16 universities in the eastern half of the United States from 1979 to 2013. This included Virginia Tech.
In basketball, Big East teams made 18 Final Four appearances and won 7 NCAA championships as Big East members through 2013 (UConn with three, Georgetown, Syracuse, Louisville and Villanova with one each).
Of the Big East’s full members, all but South Florida attended the Final Four, the most of any conference,[1] though Marquette, DePaul, Notre Dame, Rutgers, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh made all their trips before joining the Big East. In 2011, the Big East set the record for the most teams sent to the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Championship by a single conference with eleven out of their sixteen teams qualifying.
Thus, it sounds a lot like this year’s SEC number of teams in the NCAA March Madness.
Now the Big East comprises 11 full-member institutions primarily located in Northeast and Midwest metropolitan areas. The current members are Butler, Creighton, DePaul, Georgetown, Marquette, Providence, St. John’s, Seton Hall, UConn, Villanova and Xavier.
None of those current members play football, so it would be a super basketball one.
The ACC currently has eighteen member universities. With the Big East, the super conference would be 29 total teams. This new idea would segregate into two divisions or maybe even four for a new ACC.
While the idea is nothing that has not been discussed in the past few years, it is something that needs to be more than talk.
The ACC needs to make the move to be dominant in basketball, once again.
