18 teams also opens up some intriguing scheduling possibilities for basketball.
Let’s ditch the 20 game ACC schedule and push for 18 again.
Play 2 teams twice and everyone else once? Ok that equals 19 which is better than 20.
Play 3 teams twice and everyone else once? That equals 20 again.
Divide into 9 teams each in East and West and play each division foe twice and pick 2 random teams from the other side each year to make 18? rotating that every 4 years to get to all of them?
of course makes more sense to:
Divide into 9 teams each in East and West and play each division foe twice and pick 4 random teams from the other side each year to make 20? rotating that every 2 years to get to all of them?
West (Non Traditional Funk):
Cal, Stanford, SMU, Louisville, Notre Dame, Pitt, BC, Syracuse, Va Tech
East (Traditional):
UVA, UNC, Duke, Wake Forest, NC State, Clemson, Ga Tech, FSU, Miami
There solved it.
p.s. Could also do this:
Play 4 teams twice in your division one year and the other 4 the next. = 12 games in your division and play 6 of the 9 on the other side every year = 18 games total.
Play everyone once (17 game conference schedule) - no divisions and I don’t give a sh*t about UNC/Duke not getting to play twice. Start conference season after New Year!. Top 8 play ACC tournament on consecutive day (preferably Friday, Saturday and Sunday afternoon).
Should do at least a top 16 tournament to make it an actual grind. Not sure how to handle 8 games in a day in the opening round though. Might need a site with 2 suitable arenas close together. If you do that, you might as well include everyone and have 15-18 play for the right to get crushed by 1-2 I guess.
My idea is have a 16 game conference schedule and then have a third party scheduler do all the noncon, because all the self interested scheduling has yielded subtopimal matchups and then yields me having to read my fellow UVa fans pretend to be excited against another boring cupcake because it’s good for the rpi quadrant Torvik and team morale or whatever.
So that’s my good idea. But it’s not feasible. All the feasible ideas are bad, and I hate typing bad ideas here, as you all know.
When the Big East had 16 teams, the first day was the bottom 8 teams playing then the winners played #5-8 then those winners played the top 4. Same format the ACC has been using with 15 teams
Everybody has to play Duke and UNC every year or else the schools that don’t will be furious. It’s a big recruiting tool…really the whole value of being in the ACC these days for basketball.
For basketball scheduling, I just can’t yet be comfortable with a schedule where we don’t play each other team in the conference at least once during the season. True round robin dying was bad enough, but there can’t be years where we just don’t play another ACC team. (At least I can’t mentally accept that yet).
Would still do one game against all other teams, plus then have three assigned rivals that are home and away.
If you keep the current format, then you have the bottom 12 play the first day instead of the bottom 6 (games at 10/1230/3/530/8/1030? Hmm…no, that’s a crazy schedule. How would you even sell tickets if there’s not enough time to clear the stands? Make it an open seating fan fest sort of deal?).
Or add another day so 15-18 play for the right to play 9-10. 11/14 and 12/13 are the other games. Winners play 5-8, then winners of those play 1-4?
I still like my 2 arena solution. Charlotte Hornets/UNCC, NC State/UNC, Washington Wizards/GMU or UMD, Atlanta Hawks/GT, Miami Heat/UM. Or! Hear me out here. Play in a dome with side by side courts. Could be awesome. Action lagging on one court, you could watch the other one. I guess the various whistles and buzzers might be confusing to the players though. Could use different ones that make distinct sounds. But I guess either solution would cause TV issues since you’d have games competing against each other for viewers.
