With conference re-alignment not close to being done yet, the ACC gets three new additions from the Big East this coming season in the Pittsburgh Panthers, Notre Dame Fighting Irish and Syracuse Orange. They will still have the Maryland Terrapins for one more year, but after that they get replaced by the Louisville Cardinals. So if anything, the conference will get even better in two years.

All of this is of course, football driven. And that is a shame because it seems to be really messing up basketball, who was just fine with the way things were thank you. But, the ACC may be the beneficiary where other conferences, such as the Big East, have been decimated.

The ACC is already a basketball powerhouse with the Duke Blue Devils, North Carolina Tar Heels, North Carolina State Wolfpack, Miami Hurricanes, Florida State Seminoles, Wake Forest Demon Deacons, and Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets, none of them strangers to the NCAA Tournament. Now add four newcomers from their main rivals over the years, and not exactly four of the bottom feeders either, and you have the potential for the ACC hogging up NCAA at-large bids by the bucket-load.

There is also the regular season which will provide some must see match-ups all throughout the conference schedule. Check out the schedule for next season.

North Carolina will play at Syracuse and Notre Dame and will hist both Notre Dame and Pitt. Duke will host Syracuse and also play the Orange on the road. They will also face Pitt and Notre Dame on the road.

Florida State, who may land the number one 2013 prospect, Andrew Wiggins, has Notre Dame and Syracuse coming to Tallahassee and will visit Pitt.

Defending champion Miami will face Syracuse both at home and on the road, and will host both Notre Dame and Pitt.

These are just some of the new games added to an already great conference schedule of Duke vs North Carolina, Miami vs Florida State, Wake Forest vs NC State and Virginia vs Virginia Tech every night. This might be enough to send Dick Vitale over the edge.

But wait, you say? Won’t all these teams just beat up on each other, making it more difficult to get an invitation to the “Big Dance?”. I suppose that could happen every now and then to a bubble team. But the NCAA selection committee isn’t dumb. They will take into account a team’s conference schedule being brutal, just like they did this year with the Big Ten.

The Big Ten was very tough this past season. So tough that the Minnesota Golden Gophers and Illinois Illini both made it to the NCAA Tournament with sub-.500 records. Both also won a game once they got in too. Of course that did not stop the Gophers from firing coach Tubby Smith. So who this could really be tough on is the coaches. A 500 record may not look too hot to the boosters and alumni, even though it really is going to be a really good record in a league this tough.

 

,