Tough ACC could be in trouble come NCAAs

North Carolina coach Roy Williams never has filled out an NCAA Tournament bracket.

And with so many teams beating up on each other in the ACC, the top-ranked league in the nation according to the Rating Percentage Index, Williams doesn't plan to start.

Entering Tuesday night's game at No. 15 Georgia Tech, No. 14 UNC is part of a pack of four teams squashed together for fourth place in the ACC at 4-5 in league games. Tech, at 4-4, is third.

And for a league that has never sent more than six teams to the NCAA Tournament and whose programs continue to pound each other, it's a precarious place to be.

"You would hope that it doesn't have a negative impact," Tech coach Paul Hewitt said of reaching the NCAA Tournament from the middle of the ACC pack. "... I think if they (the selection committee) are educated observers of college basketball, they'll realize that we have the best league in the country.

"We're 4-4 and standing in third place. You can look at that a number of different ways _ one paper around here called us 'reeling' and that we were struggling. I was trying to figure out the logic behind that. If this is the best league in the country, and we're 4-4 and struggling and reeling, then what are the other teams that are beneath us?"

Perhaps a little nervous?

Since 1992, when Florida State joined to make it a nine-team league, only five squads have made the NCAA Tournament when they finished worse than .500 in the ACC. Four of those teams were 7-9; one, Florida State in 1998, was 6-10.

Once they got to the tournament, they went a combined 1-5.

Robert Bowlsby, the athletics director at Iowa and chair of the NCAA Tournament selection committee, said the committee does not take into account how many teams get in from each conference.

Instead, Bowlsby said, strength of schedule and how a team fared against that schedule are the most important factors in receiving a bid. The committee also looks at the last 10 games played, conference play, play against the top 50 teams, against the top 100 teams and how a team has done in key conference matchups, Bowlsby said.

"You play very well in a tough league and play a poor non-conference schedule, and you might not get in," Bowlsby said. "Play a tough non-conference schedule and have a mediocre record in conference, and you might get in."

The ACC has played the nation's toughest overall schedule and the second-best non-conference schedule, according to The RPI Report, which is compiled by Collegiate Basketball News.

Currently, The RPI Report, which mimics the actual RPI, lists six ACC schools in the top 32; all nine ACC schools are in the top 58 (RPI list is in Scoreboard, page 2C). The ACC also has three wins over teams ranked No. 1.

Maryland coach Gary Williams, whose team is 4-5 in league play, said if the ACC continues to have the toughest RPI in the nation, it definitely deserves to get "six or seven" teams in the tournament. But he also said that the 65-team NCAA Tournament has not expanded enough.

"With a 64-team field, you can have some problems," he said. "There are problems for the mid-majors who have more than one good team, there are problems for the power conferences that might have five, six or seven teams that deserve to go.

"So, I think it wouldn't be wrong to take another look at the NCAA Tournament. You go to 128 teams, you knock one game off of the regular season, and you're down to 64 very quickly, which seems to be the magic number for the people who are interested in that."

For now, most ACC coaches say they're taking a one-game-at-a-time approach instead of looking at the big picture. That might not be such a bad idea, considering one game could be the difference between finishing fifth and finishing seventh in the league.

And that could be the difference between being a lock for the bracket or being on the bubble.

"It should be apparent that we have the best league this year and people are going to lose games," Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said. "You could take our first half, we're 8-0, and take four of our games and take one possession, turn it the other way and we could be 4-4 or 5-3.

"People, nationally, have to understand that that is not the case in other leagues."

(Raleigh News & Observer writer Rachel Carter contributed to this story.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.shns.com.)