Published: March 29, 2009 12:14 am      

Big East has right to enjoy last laugh

oday as the Elite Eight winds down and Bracket Nation braces for the Final Four, the Atlantic Coast Conference finds itself with one team — North Carolina — standing among the best of college basketball. And with the way the Tar Heels sometimes play defense, or maybe we should say don’t play defense, that number could be zero very soon, making this the second time in three years the ACC hasn’t had representation in the Final Four.

Even for the most partisan ACC supporter outside of Chapel Hill, for the sake of your conference’s national standing, it probably wouldn’t kill you today to root for North Carolina and its Deputy Dawg coach to beat Oklahoma, which, of course, for some of us won’t be easy. As Lt. Frank Drebin once said in describing why women and cops don’t mix, “It’s like eating a spoonful of Drano. Sure, it’ll clean you out, but it’ll leave you hollow inside.”

Actually, hollow itself is just what the ACC did in 2004 when it sold its soul and swiped “football powers” Virginia Tech, Miami and Boston College away from the Big East for the sake of having a conference championship football game that some greedy network would swoop up with its million of dollars. The ACC would be a superpower in both football and basketball, or so it thought, and the Big East would be left to start a playground league until it finally dried up and went away.

Never, however, underestimate the power of New York City and Madison Square Garden, the world’s most famous sports arena, where the Big East plays its season-ending tournament. As the ACC gloated, Big East followers whined foul, but the leaders of their conference went out and raided other conferences — just as the pompous ACC had done to them — and brought in South Florida, Cincinnati and Louisville as full members, and DePaul and Marquette for all sports except football.

It was survival of the fittest and Big East basketball is now the fittest of them all, armed with the best players from the hottest basketball hotbeds in the country — most notably New York, Philadelphia, Washington-Baltimore — who get to show their stuff every March in Madison Square Garden, receiving the best national exposure a college basketball player can receive.

What has been the most memorable college basketball game of the season so far? Why Syracuse’s and Connecticut’s six-overtime epic, of course, played in the Garden during the Big East Tournament quarterfinals — three days before the NCAA tournament field was even drawn.

At the time of the ACC’s ill-fated raid of the Big East, coaches such as Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski and Maryland’s Gary Williams, fierce on-court rivals, stood as allies against the expansion of the conference, with Williams’ rationale being the ACC should strengthen what is already strong, and what the conference had long been known for — basketball. Yet Williams didn’t carry his school’s vote on the expansion as only Duke and North Carolina voted against it.

As it turns out, K and Williams were right as the raid on the Big East has become the ACC’s Dieppe with its football equally as mediocre as it ever was, and its treasured conference championship football game unable to cut it in Florida, having been moved to North Carolina where it still didn’t sell out. The regular-season basketball schedule, once the symmetry of winter, is now a cause for Tylenol, as ACC fans never know who their team plays next; and the basketball conference itself, once the elite of the elite, despite what the regular-season RPI says, can now only be described as one of the better conferences in the country behind the Big East, which, oh, by the way, became the first conference to put four teams in Region finals.

And if that’s not depressing enough, how does a trip to Blacksburg, Va. in the dead of winter grab you, as even the term “Blacksburg in the spring” sounds ominous. It is the ACC’s Fayetteville, Ark., of which former Arkansas football coach Lou Holtz once said isn’t the end of the world, “but you can see it from here.”

A North Carolina win today would be nice for the prestige of the ACC, but would hardly restore the luster the conference has itself thrown out the window the past five years. They wouldn’t listen to Coach K (for once), and they wouldn’t listen to Gary Williams. Perhaps the ACC should have consulted with that known bracketoligist Aesop, who once said, “Greed destroys the source of good.”

Both the Big East and the ACC are getting what they deserve.

Mike Burke is sports editor of the Cumberland Times-News. Contact Mike Burke at mburke@times-news.com.