Luke DeCock: New ACC men's basketball schedule trashes a century of NC basketball history

RALEIGH, N.C. — Let’s be perfectly clear about this. There is no room for argument on this point.

Rivalries made college sports.

Then and now.

Then: Army-Navy. The Ivy League. Michigan-Ohio State. Oklahoma-Texas. California-Stanford.

And now: UCLA-USC. Alabama-Auburn. Duke-UNC. The World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party.

Without those rivalries, especially in this era where players are getting paid millions and enjoying unrestricted free agency, college football and basketball will soon just be low-rent minor leagues with no emotional connection to their fans. Business, not personal.

Which brings us to N.C. State-North Carolina, the original Triangle rivalry, long before North Carolina and Duke caught ESPN’s fancy.

Thanks to the ACC’s innovative new men’s basketball schedule format, the Wolfpack won’t play in Chapel Hill this year for the first time since 1919, when Wake Forest was still in Wake Forest.

Nor will N.C. State go to Cameron Indoor Stadium, not as uncommon an occurrence these days, but still the site of one of the most unexpectedly dramatic games of the ACC schedule last winter. That one can deliver, too. It’s certainly a game more worth playing than Clemson-Pittsburgh, the ACC-endorsed home-and-home grudge match that’s ready to sweep the nation.

The new format is the result of going from 20 conference games to 18, and the stated purpose of all of these changes is to maximize the ACC’s chances of getting more teams into the NCAA tournament. It all seems like a lot of effort when the actual answer is simply a combination of “get good” and “stop losing to bad teams,” but even if this works, it will come at the expense of games people want to watch.

When the idea was proposed, it seemed safe to assume this “secondary partner” business would be a wink-wink way to preserve the handful of non-primary matchups that matter to fans and ESPN, like State-Carolina, while allowing would-be tournament teams to avoid resume-deflating games against teams figured to fill out the bottom of the standings.

That, at least, would have made some sense.

But now we’re sacrificing the kind of games that made the ACC a conference other schools wanted to join in the service of some nebulous attempt to game a system that can only be gamed by winning games the ACC keeps losing. Tweaking the schedule isn’t going to paper over a 2-14 performance in the ACC-SEC Challenge.

Is there really more value in N.C. State playing Virginia twice than sending the Wolfpack to Chapel Hill? Is there really more value in Duke playing Louisville twice?

You can at least argue those. There’s zero, absolutely zero, value in North Carolina playing Syracuse twice, there’s no debate about that. That’s a waste of everyone’s time. In an era where “bad for ratings” is no longer a joke, you’d think ACC schools would be more interested in playing games that people might want to watch.

We’re already dropping one matchup entirely — Duke won’t play Jai Lucas’ Miami at all, for example — just to make this secondary-partner thing work, so it would have been easy to drop others and protect historically important rivalries. Why can’t one team have multiple secondary partners while others don’t? If N.C. State isn’t playing California already, what’s the big deal if it doesn’t play Florida State too?

Of course, not everyone is lamenting these circumstances. You’ll be shocked — shocked! — to learn Notre Dame’s secondary partner is Stanford, the school the Irish managed to drag into the ACC to ensure it remained a power-conference football opponent, the one other ACC school aside from Boston College with which the Irish share some history. Whatever Notre Dame’s record is in actual ACC competition, it remains undefeated politically.

At least that’s vaguely a rivalry, at least in football. We’re walking away from more than a century of basketball history so Georgia Tech can play California twice. There was an easy solution: N.C. State and North Carolina are secondary partners, just as Boston College and Miami are — with legitimate roots in the old Big East — and just as Notre Dame and Stanford are.

Rivalries matter. The Triangle accounts for 10 of the ACC’s last 14 Final Fours in part because the standard here is so high. Everyone knows the attention that surrounds Duke-UNC is a rising tide that lifts every boat, and State’s games against those two are a lot closer to that than outsiders realize.

The attachment to college sports is personal. My school. My team. My jersey. But rivalries are the glue that holds it together. Our affiliations mix and mingle, in the office, in the gym, even across the dinner table. It’s not the love of Ohio State that leads an entire state to avoid using a single letter for a week; it’s the enmity for (M)ichigan. North Carolina cannot exist as North Carolina, fully, without Duke or N.C. State, nor can Duke or N.C. State without Carolina.

College conferences once understood this. They were built on that concept, as groupings of like-minded, regionally collocated universities that wanted to play each other on a regular basis. Because those were the opponents that fans and alumni — and players and coaches — wanted to face!

Without that friction, without that commonality, especially in this era of transient, semi-professional players, college sports is buying a ticket to irrelevance. If N.C. State’s not going to go to Chapel Hill as it has every year since World War I, what’s the difference between the ACC and the Durham Bulls and Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs? The Bulls aren’t asking you for donations on top of the ticket price, for one thing.

This new schedule isn’t going to help get more teams into the NCAA tournament if the ACC doesn’t win more games in November and December. That’s the original sin here. The schedule may help, in a best-case scenario, an edge case or two on Selection Sunday, but the stage is set long before ACC schools start playing each other.

We’re sacrificing State-Carolina and Duke-State for the “greater good” of the ACC, but it actually hurts everyone.

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