RALEIGH, N.C. — After Tuesday afternoon's run-and-gun loss to Notre Dame, Duke's only shot at keeping a 24-year NCAA tournament streak alive is to run the table in the ACC tournament. A year after the Blue Devils unilaterally shut down the tournament in Greensboro, Duke may be one of very few teams that has good reason to go back.
The ACC is determined to play the tournament, already transferred from Washington to Greensboro in hopes of simplifying any COVID-19 logistics, but it's worth considering whether it might be better for almost everyone involved to stay home this year. The teams with NCAA tournament bids would get more time to prepare (and quarantine!) while most of the teams hoping to get hot and win four or five in a row would inevitably be headed home after a game or two anyway.
So, is playing the tournament really necessary? To the ACC, the answer is a resounding yes, because as television inventory, those 14 games are invaluable, whether there are fans in the building or not. Even if you're not running a network, there are good reasons to proceed. Part of the mission this season has been to give players as close to an authentic ACC experience as possible. The tournament is a huge part of that.
There's also the chance that a Duke or a Notre Dame or a Pittsburgh could get hot and win the thing. In a season when there hasn't been an overwhelmingly dominant team — Virginia's the closest thing to it — anyone really could win the tournament. That's not just coach-speak.
"Decisions related to conference policies and procedures are made by the league's membership," an ACC spokesperson said in a prepared statement. "Our schools are committed to playing the ACC men's and women's basketball tournaments. Our league will continue to follow all state and local guidelines and those outlined by our 15 institutions as part of the ACC's Medical Advisory Group report."
But when weighed against everything else, especially if maximizing the ACC's chances in the NCAA tournament is a consideration, it's hard to see the rewards outweighing the risk. In the ACC particularly, that's an unpleasant conclusion to reach.
This is the original conference tournament, the one that helped make the ACC great, the template for all the others. Whether at Reynolds Coliseum or the Greensboro Coliseum or, later, at the far-flung reaches of the footprint, it brings the ACC together for a basketball festival that for a time was truly unlike any other and still stands above the rest.
Its original value — to determine the conference's rightful (and, for a long time, sole) representative in the NCAA tournament while bringing together all eight or nine fan bases for an entire wild weekend, like an ACC convention — was long ago made moot. It lives on as a living testament to ACC tradition. Even without Saturday night free for socializing. Even in Brooklyn.
But 11 months after last year's edition was cut short before the quarterfinals by Duke president Vincent Price as COVID-19 closed in, it's fair to ask whether whatever residual value it still has is worth the potential cost in this bizarre season, especially in a year that few if any fans will be able to attend. Whatever decades-long attendance streaks weren't broken last year will fall this time around.
There has been enough interruption — more than a quarter of the ACC schedule has been postponed or rescheduled — to ask whether gathering every team in the ACC and potentially a bunch of parents and maybe even a few deep-pocketed boosters at a common location immediately before the NCAA tournament is worth the potential disruption. In a year when everyone's just trying to make it to the finish line — some teams with more success than others — are these extra games really necessary? Or merely a necessary evil?
At this moment, Louisville and Florida State are both shut down due to COVID-19. Boston College had only five healthy scholarship players for a loss to N.C. State and North Carolina's game Saturday at Virginia hangs in the balance after Tar Heels players and managers held an unmasked, indoor party after the win over Duke, which led to the postponement of Monday's game against Miami. Games were missing from the schedule Tuesday and Wednesday as well.
It doesn't take much sand in the gears to bring the great ACC machine to a halt.
The odds are against all 15 teams even making it there, and all it would take is one leak in the bubble to potentially sink the national championship hopes of ... OK, that's not as much of a consideration this year.
It still might be better for everyone's sake to take this one off, let the five or six or seven NCAA qualifiers get ready in seclusion for the big tournament in Indianapolis and give the teams that have earned a bid over the course of this difficult regular season the best chance to compete.
After all, we learned last year that the tournament champion doesn't have to be the ACC champion. Seven decades of precedent were thrown out the window, albeit for good reason. Once more wouldn't hurt.
Instead, the show will almost certainly go on, in a vacant building, hoping for the best.
