Atlantic Coast Conference: Moving to 20 games for conference basketball
The Atlantic Coast Conference will move toward a twenty game conference basketball schedule in 2019.
There may be football in the future of the Atlantic Coast Conference. I keep saying that and yet there seems to be more basketball stories that pop up. Coach K inserted Kyrie Irving into the starting lineup for the US National Team in their exhibition game against Argentina. ACC Media Days have come and gone. Those revealed that the basketball schedule will be tweeked in 2019 in time for the new media deal with ESPN.
That change is the addition of two more conference games to the slate. This causes several ripple effects within the league, though it does not solve all the problems that an enlarged ACC created.
The first change will be the addition of two more home-and-home series. This will give the members of the League more of a chance to bring in more important rivals into their building. As it stands, each ACC team has a couple of rivals that it will play home-and-home every year. However some teams (North Carolina) have more than just the two traditional rivals.
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Now there is a greater chance that North Carolina will play Wake Forest twice in a given year. This is true for the other teams in the conference as well. That home-and-home against Duke for the northern schools were come by more often now.
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The addition of two conference games should also strengthen the schedules of member schools. Two games will now have to leave schedules, and the hope is that the cupcake schools will be the ones that go. However some schools could use the addition of harder games to chop tougher non-conference games from their list instead.
Stronger schedules mean stronger resumes come tournament time when schedule strength becomes a factor with who gets into the NCAA Tournament and how high they are ranked when they get there.
Next: PGA Championship staying in Charlotte for the moment
2019 looks like it will be an interesting year for ACC sports, all things considered. This year should be pretty good too though.