http://www.sportsline.com/spin/story/10070295

ClayNation: Thank heavens for a break from ACC Madness


Clay Travis March 19, 2007
By Clay Travis
SPiN Columnist
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Six of the seven ACC teams that started this tournament are gone after the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament. Good riddance. That's because since November, at least three to four days and nights each week we have to hear about how strong ACC basketball is. The media love affair with ACC basketball is great (in an extraordinarily sarcastic sense) except when, like this year, the ACC's strength is a figment of the media's creation.

Conference USA, the Mountain West, the Horizon, and the Missouri Valley all have the same number of Sweet 16 teams as the ACC ... one. But those conferences probably got equal media attention, right? And the backwoods conferences of the Pac-10, Big 12 and the SEC all have at least twice as many teams. But they don't really play basketball in those conferences, right?

I don't even have anything particularly against ACC schools, but the media hosannas are nauseating. If I didn't have to hear how spectacular every ACC school and every ACC player was each time I watched the teams play, I'd probably watch a lot more of their games with the sound on. As it is, I generally turn off the sound and cycle through the games on my DVR. I already know exactly what praise the announcers are going to heap upon the schools and players because I've been hearing the same scripted announcing for the past 10 years.

I can't be alone in being so tired of also hearing the ACC schools lobby for each other to make the NCAA Tournament every year. I'm sure the predictable excuses will shortly follow now that only one of the ACC schools is playing more than a weekend in the NCAA tourney. In fact, I'm certain I'm beating the ACC apologists to the draw.

Here are 11 ACC excuses for its poor tourney performances (I'm channeling an ACC fan) along with 11 alternating observations of mine from the first week's NCAA Tourney action.

1. The ACC teams are tired from the grueling ACC basketball schedule. If this argument hasn't started already it will soon.

2. The NCAA Tournament commercials are horrible. And insanely repetitive. By Sunday I wanted to strangle that woman in the car commercial who is supposedly driving with Bobby Knight tied up in her back seat. This is what happens when I forsake my DVR for a weekend.

Just a question ... how much does the car company have to pay Bobby Knight to pretend that he's tied up in the back of the car? Because I'm willing to auction off the rights to any company that wants to pretend I'm tied up in the back of the car right now.

And the Lowe's basketball fans that aren't actually fans of any existing NCAA teams are terrible. Why would you sponsor the NCAA Tournament and then not pay the extra money to dress fans up in legit NCAA gear? It reminds me of that Michael Jordan Ballpark Franks hotdog commercial where he wasn't playing basketball in a Bulls uniform.

3. ACC teams shouldn't be required to play in the first round of the NCAA Tournament because the first round is for teams without blue-blooded basketball lineage. The ACC is basketball royalty, the House of Lords (back when all the seats were still inherited), and the rest of the NCAA schools are mere peons occasionally worthy of the crumbs from our wine, cheese, brie and crumpets.

4. Len Elmore's insistence that "untracked" is a word that has a positive connotation. And then just when I'm trying to get over this bastardization of the English language, Bill Raftery starts saying it too. This "word" is spreading with alarming alacrity. And what does the word really mean, you might be wondering? It's an adjective meaning "lacking pathways."

Listen, you can be on track and you can be off track, but how does being untracked have any connection, positive or otherwise, to basketball at all? Unless teams are walking to the games through a dense forest and have lost their way. I really think someone has mixed up on track with untracked and started using untracked as if it is the same thing as on track. Well, it isn't. Not even close.

All tournament long players have been described as needing to get "untracked" by announcers. This is absurd. Players need to lack pathways? I'll tell you what announcers need: a dictionary.

5. Dick Vitale isn't calling the ACC games in the NCAA tourney because he is under salaried contract to ESPN for the GNP of Poland. The sheen off Dick Vitale's bald pate in the broadcast booth is worth 10-12 points to the ACC teams when they play out-of-conference foes.

6. My HD feeds of the tourney games made zero sense all weekend. So did the fact that my HD feed was often a different game than my non-HD game. So I missed the start of both Tennessee and Vandy-GW because I was waiting for the HD to switch to the right game. And then, half the time, the HD would just miraculously appear or miraculously disappear with no explanation. The television screen fluctuation in size was the rough equivalent of watching Oprah diet.

7. The student-athletes in the ACC, who are all perfectly upstanding gentlemen and never curse or forget to wear their ascots and sweater vests (at least according to the announcers), were probably stressed over their midterms. Remember, books before ball.

8. Greg Oden absolutely destroyed Justin Cage for Xavier with a few seconds left. There was no doubt in my mind that it was an intentional foul. Cage went at least 10 feet off the court. Then, shockingly, CBS showed us no replays of the foul and neither Gus Johnson nor Dan Bonner made any mention of the fact that Oden should have been called for an intentional foul. Or even discussed the fact that it was a possibility.

If a Duke player, say Josh McRoberts, had pulled what Oden did at the end of the game everyone would be filled with righteous indignation. But Oden got a complete pass on his cheap shot. Tough blow for Xavier.

9. Only one ACC team got to play at home in its home state, North Carolina. This is shameful on the part of the NCAA. Everyone knows that ACC teams deserve to play all of their games at home in the Tournament because they have the best fans on earth and because they have the best gyms and the best popcorn and hotdogs in the universe and their students are all going to be rocket scientists or neurosurgeons and their cheerleaders are all virgins who save themselves for marriage (except for that one time with that lovable scamp Brendan Haywood).

10. The exaggerated post-shot pose from successful shooters is the 2007 version of the jersey pop. It's almost like following your shot or getting back on defense has just been completely abandoned in favor of the shooting pose with the upraised hand delicately turned down at the wrist. Everyone wants the full-HD shot of just them artfully posed as their shot swishes the nets. And how about the death of the jersey pop? From omnipresent to dead-and-buried in one season. Jersey pops are the Ryan Phillipe of on-court trends.

11. Coach K spent too much time filming that stupid Coach Jay or Coach K commercial and consequently his team wasn't ready to play. Coach K, like the ACC, is just too popular for his own good. For the record, the Coach Jay or Coach K commercial is also one of the three most annoying commercials to be airing on television. This thing is fine once, but watching it any more times than this is painful.

12. The fact that Tim Brando quoted Tennessee's Bruce Pearl as saying you always foul when you're up three with less than 10 seconds remaining. Then, with five seconds remaining, and UT up three, they allowed Virginia's Singletary to shoot a 3 that would have tied the game. My friend Junaid and I were apoplectic.

13. ACC teams aren't challenged enough by teams not from the ACC and they play down to their level of competition. And anyway, everyone knows that all 12 ACC schools should receive automatic byes to the Sweet 16 since all 12 of the ACC schools are inevitably better than all but three or four teams in the rest of the country.

14. My wife's endorsement of Joakim Noah's ponytail being up higher on the back of his head for the first round: "His ponytail looks really good today. He should go with the high ponytail for every game." I still don't even know what to say to this. My inclination is that having a ponytail and being able to dunk on someone is probably the most emasculating thing that can happen on an NCAA basketball court since John Stockton crossed someone over in those short-shorts.

15. This isn't really an ACC excuse but Will Blythe's ACC basketball book, To Hate Like This is to be Happy Forever, is a great read. Even for someone, like me, who enjoys ridiculing the absurd pretensions of ACC basketball fans.

16. Is it written in Billy Packer's CBS contract that he must call every Kentucky basketball game when it comes time for the NCAA Tournament? Also, congrats to Packer for becoming the first sportscaster in the past six years to not wear a flag lapel pin on his suit jacket. It's about time this ridiculous trend stops. Of course my friend Tardio immediately called me when he noted the flag's absence. "Billy Packer's a communist," he said.

17. Boston College only counts as an ACC program when it does well in the NCAA Tournament. When the Eagles do poorly they are basically still members of the Big East. So it doesn't matter that they lost. Also they are Yankees. Ewww.

18. Kentucky fans (7,817 to be exact) were online at Catpause.com in the immediate aftermath of their loss to Kansas. On a Sunday afternoon. Yeah, Tubby's in no trouble at all. Also several of the guys behind firetubbysmith.com emailed and are amazingly normal fans. This anti-Tubby big blue wave is not made up of just Internet crazies. Far from it.

19. Florida State, Clemson, and N.C. State were all disrespected. All three would have doubtless advanced to the Final Four on the strength of their formidable conference tests if only they had been selected for the tourney. Haven't you seen how they've been dominating the NIT?

20. Did anyone else hear that CBS's 60 Minutes was doing a story about Simon Cowell? I think I heard something about it once or twice, or every third minute for four days. One or the other. How about Packer's awkward, "I haven't touched you," comment to Jim Nantz near the end of Kentucky-Kansas when Nantz asked him about Simon Cowell. This is the only time I've ever heard Jim Nantz out of sorts in the broadcast booth.

21. ACC schools were under-seeded. It's a travesty of basketball justice that all seven ACC teams didn't receive No. 1 seeds. Also, how come nobody is pointing out that the only reason the Big Ten has even a single team left is because Greg Oden has to decapitate someone with a samurai sword to get called for an intentional foul?

22. The state of Tennessee has three teams in the Sweet 16 -- Vandy, Tennessee, and Memphis. It's particularly gratifying to me, as a native Tennessean, that there are three stories involving Tennessee and the number 16, and none of them involve underage cousins.