Lousier Teams, Period
Although No. 5 Duke and No. 8 North Carolina are once again having strong seasons, the ACC is just the fifth-best conference in the country, according to statistician Ken Pomeroy's rankings.
The last one is the most important. Most of the teams in the ACC are hot garbage. Bodes well for getting a new TV contract
Yeah - they should have just put this and ended the article:
The conference sucks. The quality of play is at it's lowest point probably in the history of the league. You know why 2004 had such high attendance? The league was LOADED. The ACC got one 1 seed, two 3 seeds, two 4 seeds and one 6 seed in the NCAA Tournament. In a 9 team league.
Expansion didn't make Georgia Tech, Maryland, Wake Forest and NCSU fall off a damn cliff. Poor management, bad coaching hires and poor recruiting did. Those are the 4 most historically successful programs in the modern era of the ACC not named UNC or Duke and for all 4 to collapse at once has really, really hurt the league.
Yeah - they should have just put this and ended the article:
The conference sucks. The quality of play is at it's lowest point probably in the history of the league. You know why 2004 had such high attendance? The league was LOADED. The ACC got one 1 seed, two 3 seeds, two 4 seeds and one 6 seed in the NCAA Tournament. In a 9 team league.
Expansion didn't make Georgia Tech, Maryland, Wake Forest and NCSU fall off a damn cliff. Poor management, bad coaching hires and poor recruiting did. Those are the 4 most historically successful programs in the modern era of the ACC not named UNC or Duke and for all 4 to collapse at once has really, really hurt the league.
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Although he thinks they're capable coaches, Odom said the current ACC crop appears as though it "came out of a chemistry lab."
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Yeah - they should have just put this and ended the article:
The conference sucks. The quality of play is at it's lowest point probably in the history of the league. You know why 2004 had such high attendance? The league was LOADED. The ACC got one 1 seed, two 3 seeds, two 4 seeds and one 6 seed in the NCAA Tournament. In a 9 team league.
Expansion didn't make Georgia Tech, Maryland, Wake Forest and NCSU fall off a damn cliff. Poor management, bad coaching hires and poor recruiting did. Those are the 4 most historically successful programs in the modern era of the ACC not named UNC or Duke and for all 4 to collapse at once has really, really hurt the league.
Lee Fowler, probably the most inept AD in history
David Braine at Georgia Tech would like to have a word with you. Let's just say the lifetime contract he gave Paul Hewitt was barely in the top 5 of the most awful things he did.
HDTV and the explosion of games available every night on cable/satellite is the single biggest reason.
Then combine that with a generally mediocre product on the court (or at Wake, even worse than mediocre).
In a nutshell: Why should I pay thousands of dollars for season tickets to Wake basketball, and then invest a few more thousand in travel expenses (I have an 8-hour roundtrip drive to the Joel, which means a hotel night and a half-day/full-day away from work during the week), when I can watch on a big-screen HDTV with no drive required?
And if I watch Wake (which I increasingly don't), if we are stinking up the joint yet again, I can just surf away to another channel.
And I don't face sitting in the parking mess of the Joel for an hour, then another 4 hours to get home.
Not hard to figure out.
Obviously a better team in a better league would yield bigger crowds, but does this trend potentially lead to smaller, more intimate venues?
HDTV and the explosion of games available every night on cable/satellite is the single biggest reason.
Then combine that with a generally mediocre product on the court (or at Wake, even worse than mediocre).
In a nutshell: Why should I pay thousands of dollars for season tickets to Wake basketball, and then invest a few more thousand in travel expenses (I have an 8-hour roundtrip drive to the Joel, which means a hotel night and a half-day/full-day away from work during the week), when I can watch on a big-screen HDTV with no drive required?
And if I watch Wake (which I increasingly don't), if we are stinking up the joint yet again, I can just surf away to another channel.
And I don't face sitting in the parking mess of the Joel for an hour, then another 4 hours to get home.
Not hard to figure out.