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ESPN/NCAA Basketball.
ACC Standings.
AP Top 25 (Jan.31).
Jeff Sagarin NCAA basketball ratings (USA Today.com)…by team
by Conference.
Ohio State are the only undefeated team in the country, and of course are #1. Kansas is #2, at 20-1. Texas is #3 at 18-3. Pitt is #4 at 20-2. Duke is #5 (down from 3rd, last week), at 19-2. Reigning national champs Duke’s first loss snapped a 25 game winning streak, and it was to unranked fellow ACC member Floride State, on January 12th. The Florida State Seminoles, under coach Leonard Hamilton, have qualified for March Madness in 2009 and 2010, and are now making an early case for a tournament bid in 2011.
Duke’s second loss came last weekend, away at Madison Square Garden in New York City, to St. John’s. St. John’s are 5-5 in the Big East this season and unranked, while Duke are 7-1 in the ACC this season, so it was a significant upset, especially since St. John’s beat the Blue Devils by a 15-point margin, 93-78…Jan. 30, – AP via ESPN.go.com, ‘St. John’s stymies No. 3 Duke to reel off 3rd ranked win’. It was Duke’s largest margin of defeat versus an unranked opponent in 15 seasons.
If you glance at the Sagarin ratings by conference, you will see that this season, as far as the top 10 conferences go, the ACC is slipping towards a more mediocre rating, at 4th best conference, with the Big East and the Big Ten ascending, to be first and second rated, and the Mountain West gaining the most (3) places, into fifth rated.
Sagarin Conference ratings (and comparison to their final 2009-10 Sagarin ratings) 1st through 10th best rated conferences are…
1st, Big East (up from 3rd in 2009-10).
2nd, Big Ten (up from 4th in 2009-10).
3rd, Big 12 (down from 1st in 2009-10).
4th, ACC (down from 2nd in 2009-10).
5th, Mountain West (up from 8th in 2009-10).
6th, SEC (down from 5th in 2009-10).
7th, Pac-10 (down from 6th in 2009-10).
8th, Conference USA (up from 10th in 2009-10).
9th, Atlantic 10 (down from 7th in 2009-10).
10th, Horizon (up from 12th in 2009-10).
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In Men’s Basketball, the ACC features two of the most successful college basketball programs in the United States – North Carolina (with 5 national championships, last in 2009) and Duke (with 4 national championships, including the 2010 title). The ACC also has amongst its members two other teams that have won national basketball championships: North Carolina State (with 2 championships, their last in 1983), and Maryland (who won their title in 2004). The North Carolina Tar Heels’ 5 titles puts them tied for third-best all-time (with Indiana) [UCLA is top with 11 titles, and Kentucky has the second-most titles, with 7]…’NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Championship/Winners‘ (en.wikipedia.org). NC and Duke are also at the top of the list of all-time-most Final Four appearances {see this}. North Carolina has made it to the Final Four an impressive 18 times (tied with UCLA for most), while Duke has the third-most Final Four appearances, with 15.
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The Atlantic Coast Conference is known almost universally as the ACC. The ACC came about as a result of a mass exodus of 7 then-members of the Southern Conference in 1953. Clemson, Duke, Maryland, North Carolina, North Carolina State, South Carolina, and Wake Forest were those 7 schools. The 7 left primarily because of the Southern Conference’s ban on post-season play (ie, college football Bowl games). Bylaws were ratified for the Atlantic Coast Conference in June, 1953. In December, 1953 an 8th school joined – Virginia, from the Metro Conference. In early 1954, the first season of ACC Basketball began. Unlike, say, the Big Ten [which is my next map in this series], the ACC has always had a Basketball Tournament to decide the conference champion.
The make-up of the ACC remained static for 19 years, until 1971, when South Carolina left to become an Independent (South Carolina is now in the SEC). The ACC operated with 7 members until 1978, when Georgia Tech joined from the Metro Conference. The total number of member schools reached nine with the addition of Florida State, also formerly from the Metro Conference, in July 1991. This 9 school set-up lasted until 2004/05, when there was a big shake-up within the ACC and the Big East…Miami and Virginia Tech jumped from the Big East to the ACC in 2004, and Boston College followed suit in 2005. The latter school’s presence making it the first occasion of an ACC member-school being from north of the Mason-Dixon line. That made it 12 teams in the ACC, and that is how it has remained. The make-up of the two divisions, Atlantic and Coastal, can be seen on the map page, with the teams’ profile boxes split up by division, and arranged top to bottom alphabetically.
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On the map page, team profile boxes are at the right. Each team’s profile box includes…primary logo; full name of school; location of main campus, basketball venue; year of the school’s establishment; year of the establishment of the school’s varsity basketball team; undergraduate enrollment; ACC Basketball titles (and year of last title); seasons spent in ACC Basketball; NCAA Basketball Tournament titles (and year of last title); NCAA Final Four appearances (and year of last Final Four appearance), and total number of NCAA Basketball Tournament appearances (and year of last appearance). Plus I squeezed in each team’s coach, and years he has spent coaching there. Then there is an interior photo of the team’s arena. Above the team’s arena photo is listed their 2009-10 avergae attendance. Finally, I have included a photo of the team’s most recent away basketball jersey that I could find. I stuck with away jerseys, out of both aesthetic reasons (white jerseys being bland and boring), and frankly, out of necessity, because some schools don’t even seem to make their men’s basketball team’s home white jerseys available for purchase on the Internet (and I am not going to spend my time cobbling together home white jerseys out of blank jersey templates, logos, segments of photos, and my drawing program, like I was forced to do with two teams, Rutgers and Providence, on my Big East basketball map {here}. The one exception ended up being with Maryland – I used Maryland’s alternate, yellow-with-red-and-black-trim jersey (it was the only jersey they sell – they aren’t wearing red away jerseys this year, but instead, black; and they are wearing their yellow jerseys often – home and away).
On the map itself are the city locations of the teams. At the lower left of the map page are the final standings for 2010 ACC Basketball; a listing of the 2 ACC teams that were nationally ranked by the AP (Duke at #3 and Maryland at #20); as well as a listing of the 6 ACC teams that qualified for the 2010 NCAA Basketball Tournament (Duke, Georgia Tech, Maryland, Wake Forest, Clemson, and Florida State), their seeding in the tournament, and how far the team went in the tournament. As mentioned, Mike Krzyzewski’s Duke went all the way to win Duke’s fourth national championship (it was Coach K’s fourth national title with Duke as well). The Blue Devils were just able to fend off Cinderella-team Butler in the March Madness final, by a 61-59 score. Before that, Duke had also won the ACC Tournament, beating Georgia Tech 65-61 in the ACC final.
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At the lower left of the map page are 2009-10 average home attendances, venue capacities, and percent capacities of ACC teams. {source – pdf of 2009-10 NCAA basketball attendance (NCAA.org)}. The best-drawing team in the ACC in 2009-10 was, once again, North Carolina, who averaged 17,786 per game. But the Tar Heels had a real poor season by their standards, not even qualifying for March Madness, and were only able to fill the 21,750-capacity Dean Smith Center in Chapel Hill, NC to a 81.8% capacity. Maryland had the second-best attendance in the ACC last season, pulling in an average of 16,792 per game, to a respectable 93.6% capacity at the ComCast Center in College Park, MD. Best percent capacity was, of course, Duke, who once again played to 100% capacity in their small, raucous, and visitor-unfriendly Cameron Indoor Stadium in Durham, NC. If you are wondering why a college basketball program as prominent as Duke only plays in a 9,314-seat arena, well, Duke athletics certainly does not need to rely on ticket sales to keep their sports programs viable…Duke is a private university with an endowment at $4.8 billion , making the school the tihird-most-endowed school in the US [#1 is Michigan, #2 is Columbia]. This flush state of affairs for the school was the initial result of tobacco money from the Duke Endowment, which saw the school change it’s name from Trinity College to Duke University in 1924. Besides, if Duke built a larger arena they would very likely wreck their home-court vibe and run the risk of not selling out games. Because after all, Duke, in Durham, is just 11 miles away from Chapel Hill and the North Carolina Tar Heels, and NC definitely has a larger fan base.
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Photo credits -
Boston College…Conte Forum photo from bceagles.cstv.com/conte-forum-info, here. Jersey, at store.cstv.com/Boston College online store, here.
Clemson…Littlejohn Coliseum photo from clemsontigers.cstv.com/facilities, here. Jersey from store.cstv.com, here.
Duke…Cameron Indoor Stadium photo, submitted by en1044 at Sktscrapercity.com/forums thread ‘USA – College Basketball Arenas’, here.
Florida State…{note, thanks to NoleFan.org for date of est. of FSU bk}. Donald L. Tucker Center photo from seminoles.com/facilities, here (full panorama image). Jersey from seminoles.com/shop, here.
Georgia Tech…Alexander Memorial Coliseum photo, Getty Images at Daylife.com, here. Jersey at ramblinwreckstore.com.
Maryland…Comcast Center photo by Mike Haw at flickr.com, here. Jersey from store.cstv.com, here.
Miami…Bank United center photo from hurricanesports.cstv.com, here. Jersey from shopmiamihurricanes.com, here.
North Carolina…Dean Smith Center photo from tarheelblue.cstv.com/Inside Arthletics/Facilities, here. Jersey from store.cstv.com, here.
North Carolina State…RBC Center photo by User B at en.wikipedia.org, here. Jersey from store.cstv.com, here.
Virginia…John Paul Jones Arena photo from the University of Virginia vioa ESPN, here. Jersey from FootballFanatics.com, here.
Virginia Tech…Cassell Coliseum photo submitted by en1044 at Skyscrapercity.com/forums thread ‘USA – College Basketball Arenas’, here. Jersey from CollegeBasketballStore, here.
Wake Forest…photo of “The Joel” from Sportsposterwarehouse.com, here. Jersey from College BasketballStore.com, here.
Thanks to the contributors at en.wikipedia.org, ‘Atlantic Coast Conference‘.
Thanks to NCAA.org, for attendance figures.
