RALEIGH, N.C. — The ACC basketball schedule that (finally) came out Tuesday morning could have used a little more time in the oven. The ACC had yet to finalize some television windows with ESPN, something that under normal circumstances usually happens in August, which meant the ACC had to lump all of the midweek games together as "Tuesday or Wednesday" and sort it out later. Same for some games on the final weekend of the season.
It hardly needs to be said that these aren't exactly normal circumstances, but not only are there not times or networks, which isn't uncommon, there aren't even firm dates for some games, which is. With the start of the season looming two weeks from Wednesday, there wasn't any other choice. Plans had to be made. The schedule had to go out now, finalized or not, fully or half-baked.
"We don't have a lot of wiggle room because of the way it lays out," ACC senior associate commissioner Paul Brazeau said Tuesday. "But we'll continue to monitor. You can always set a new course as you go along. There's nothing to prevent us from making up a new plan. You want to be nimble. You don't want to keep changing the recipe every day, but you have to be nimble with it."
Last year, the schedule wasn't released until mid-September, and then an extra 32 minutes later than expected after a women's soccer game ran long and delayed the televised announcement on the ACC Network. That was historically late for the ACC. This is truly exceptional, even if it's easy to understand why.
The Schrodinger's cattiness of this schedule — when a game can be on Tuesday and Wednesday at the same time but will not actually be played on both — is as good a reminder as any that any plans made in a pandemic are subject to change, a basketball schedule most of all. Given the experience of football and other sports, the odds that all of this goes off as planned and scheduled are slim at best. That reality loomed over the entire process of making the schedule, one of many differences from the norm.
And with 20 conference games crammed into a season that was already seven days shorter than usual even before the NCAA lopped 15 days off the front but only reduced the season by four games, the ACC couldn't build any wiggle room into it the way some conferences have, with a gap after the final regular season games for any rescheduling.
There were certainly accommodations made to take advantage of the unusual circumstances. With virtual classes removing some of the impetus for rushing back to campus, teams on the outer edges of the league were given the opportunities to make the longest trips into two-game road swings. Boston College, for example, finishes the regular season at Florida State on a Tuesday/Wednesday and at Miami on a Friday/Saturday. There are several NBA-light road trips like that, although it's still up to the individual schools whether they want to stay on the road between games or come home.
And with many schools moving finals all over the place, instead of grouping together in a three-week period of December, there were also opportunities to shoehorn games into that window that wouldn't ordinarily have been considered. Other things did not change: The season will still end, on Saturday, March 6, with Duke at North Carolina.
In the end, the virus is in control, as always, and there's only so much planning that can be done now. The schedule is just a guide. Just as disruptions are coming, inevitably, so the ACC and its schools will have to adapt on the fly.
"We'll have to deal with them as they come," Brazeau said. "We may have people playing a different number of games than others. Not everyone may be able to play every game. If it can easily be rescheduled, we would sure take a look at it, but we may not be able to."
This is far from the first schedule Brazeau has had to piece together since he arrived at the ACC in 2014, but it's certainly the most unique. While individual schools were herding cats throughout October and into November trying to get their nonconference games figured out, the ACC was doing the same with the conference slate, and technically it still isn't finished.
It's close enough to call the job complete, even if it's hard to imagine things proceeding as they have been laid out on paper.
"It'll be more difficult to play than to put together," Brazeau said, the weary words of a man who knows his scheduling worries may only be beginning.
