By R.L. Bynum
The latest ACC expansion will eliminate more tradition but also create more scheduling equity in women’s basketball.
No. 24 North Carolina’s Thursday visit to No. 5 N.C. State will be the first of two regular-season women’s basketball meetings. Since the rivals first battled officially in 1975, you could always count on seeing them battle in Carmichael Auditorium/Arena and Reynolds Coliseum every season.
This will be the 49th time they’ll play twice in the regular season and the last time in the foreseeable future because of ACC expansion.
ACC women’s teams play 18 conference games. With the additions next season of Stanford, Cal and SMU making it a 17-school league, the number of league teams Carolina faces twice will go from four to one.
Each team will play a designated rival twice, which means that UNC and Duke will still play twice every season. The Tar Heels will meet every other team in the conference only once during the regular season.
The league hasn’t officially announced that plan for next season. But Jackie Carson, the league’s senior associate commissioner for women’s basketball, confirmed it during an October interview with WUNC’s Mitchell Northam.
“Everybody has one chance to knock off somebody in the league, and then you have a model where you have a rival to keep some of our important rivalries intact,” she said in the interview. “We can’t give up that Duke-Carolina rivalry or UVa-Virginia Tech.”
From a scheduling perspective, the UNC-N.C. State game — a rivalry with a rich tradition — will fall to the same level of importance as when Carolina takes on SMU for the first time next season.
With a 20-game men’s basketball schedule, Coach Hubert Davis’ team will play three teams twice each season. Two obviously will be Duke and N.C. State, but the third team isn’t clear. Although Wake Forest seems logical, it could end up being Virginia.
The upside of the new women’s basketball scheduling model is that UNC’s league schedule won’t be as tough.
Under the current model in its last season, the league divided schools into three scheduling groups or pods, with teams playing the other teams in their group twice and every other ACC team once.
“It would probably make our model a little bit more balanced because you eliminate those scheduling pods,” Carson told WUNC. “There was always going to be one pod that was stronger than the other.”
That stronger pod in recent years has always been Carolina’s, which includes N.C. State, Virginia Tech, Virginia and Duke. It’s the only one of the three groups that combined for a winning ACC record last season.
“We know that it’s a league that has a bit of an imbalanced schedule because the middle group plays all the tough teams twice, and that’s how that whole thing works,” UNC coach Courtney Banghart said after a recent game.
Starting next season, that’s not how it will work.
The Hokies won the ACC title last season, and the Wolfpack won three consecutive seasons before that.
Two northern group teams have combined for six ACC titles in Notre Dame (5) and Louisville (1), but that group also includes three teams that have never won an ACC title: Pittsburgh (won a regular-season Big East title in 1984), Boston College (won the Big East in 2004) and Syracuse.
The teams in the southern group — Miami, Florida State, Georgia Tech, Clemson and Wake Forest — have enjoyed much easier schedules.
The last time one of those teams won an ACC title was 1999, when current UNC assistant coach Itoro Coleman was the head coach at Clemson. Miami hasn’t won a league title since winning the last of three Big East titles in 1993, and the Jackets and Deacs have never won a conference title.
UNC’s group has three teams currently ranked (No. 5 N.C. State, No. 17 Virginia Tech and No. 24 UNC), as does the northern group (No. 14 Notre Dame, No. 16 Louisville and No. 21 Syracuse), but there are no ranked teams in the southern group after Florida State fell out of the poll this week.
Carolina’s group enters Thursday’s games with a combined league record of 27–17 after combining to go 52–38 last season. The northern group is 23–19 and was 44–46 last season, while the southern group is 15–31 and was 39–51 last season.
Expansion is forcing the ACC to give up some Triangle traditions, but UNC, Duke, and N.C. State will appreciate the more fair regular-season women’s basketball schedule.
Photo courtesy of UNC Athletics
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