The sudden retirement of Maryland coach Gary Williams late last week added to the gravity of the discussions about basketball at this week's annual ACC meetings at Fernandina Beach, Fla.
Coaches, administrators and conference officials will meet today through Wednesday to continue plotting a course for the future for the sport whose history and tradition have built the ACC's reputation more than any other.
The idea of increasing the number of conference games from 16 to 18 will be among the issues debated, although it's not likely to come to a vote until the ACC's fall meeting.
"I do think this is a critical meeting for our league," Virginia Tech coach Seth Greenberg said. "We need to resolve some issues that are critical to the direction of our league."
Other sports and issues will be discussed, of course. The ACC's new television contract with ESPN and partner Raycom Sports takes effect in the 2011-12 season.
The mechanism for maximizing the effectiveness of the agreement for TV and the conference will be important. But with ACC basketball coming off a less than stellar season, improving that sport is a hot topic.
"We have a great product here," Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said in February. "ACC basketball has been great. You've got to keep working at it, keep working at it."
Changing faces
There is a lot of work to do, in part because the ACC has undergone significant changes in the last three years.
Williams' retirement guarantees that the ACC will open the 2011-12 season with just four coaches who have more than two seasons of experience at their current schools.
Krzyzewski, Greenberg, North Carolina's Roy Williams and Florida State's Leonard Hamilton are the only ACC coaches who were at their current schools in 2008-09.
Five of the 12 ACC schools have fired their basketball coaches in the last three years in an indication that performance hasn't matched expectations.
"We have a lot of new coaches coming into the league," ACC commissioner John Swofford said Thursday, "and there is a great deal of hope in terms of revitalizing some of the programs that have not been quite up to their own standards where they have contributed so much over the years."
Other measures also show that the ACC has slipped. The Ratings Percentage Index is a mathematical formula that measures a conference's strength based on its win-loss record and the quality of its schedule.
According to the website realtimerpi.com, the ACC ranked No. 1 among all conferences in the RPI four times in six seasons from 2003-04 to 2008-09. The ACC dropped to third in 2009-10 and fifth - behind even the lightly regarded Mountain West Conference - in 2010-11.
The ACC's level of success in the NCAA tournament also has dropped significantly since the conference added Boston College, Miami and Virginia Tech to become a 12-member league beginning in 2005-06.
In six seasons as a 12-team conference, the ACC has posted a .600 NCAA tournament winning percentage that ranks third among the BCS conferences behind the SEC (.609) and Big 12 (.603).
In its final six tournaments as a nine-team conference, from 1999 to 2004, the ACC's winning percentage was .692. That's far ahead of the .654 number posted by the next-best conference, the Big East.
Despite the statistical dropoffs, coaches who work in the conference say the competition remains ferocious in the ACC. They talk about changing the way outsiders view the league as the Big East has surged past the ACC in terms of reputation.
"Anything we can do to re-establish the perception of our league needs to be discussed," Greenberg said.
More conference games?
Greenberg declined to discuss any specific ideas for the future of the league.
But Swofford confirmed that the ACC is closely studying the issue of expanding the schedule of conference games from 16 to 18.
The 16-game conference schedule once allowed each team in the nine-team ACC to play each opponent twice. Since expansion, coaches have been reluctant to increase the number of conference games for fear of strengthening their schedules to the point where they would be reluctant to play high-profile nonconference opponents.
"We're a one-time-zone league," Krzyzewski said in February. "You've got to give us a chance to play in different time zones, different places, get out and play different teams from throughout the country. That's what made this conference. This conference didn't become what it is because we stayed isolated within this region."
In 2010-11, the Big East, Big Ten and Pac-10 played 18-game conference schedules. Teams in the ACC, Big 12 and SEC played 16 conference games.
Swofford said the ACC is working to determine whether an 18-game schedule helps a conference put more teams into the NCAA tournament. Swofford said it would be "premature" for him to state his own opinion on an 18-game conference schedule.
"There are obviously pluses and minuses depending on your point of view," Swofford said. "From a fan standpoint, in some ways from a business standpoint, in direct fashion, from a television standpoint there are some definite pluses there."
Improving perception
Swofford said the ACC will continue to move forward with new plans for ticket distribution and ancillary fan events at the ACC tournament. Those plans, which involved getting tickets to schools with greater fan support, resulted in improved attendance in 2011 over 2010.
Perhaps in an effort to improve the "perception" of the ACC alluded to by Greenberg, Swofford said there are lots of plans to leverage the league's media coverage under the new agreement with ESPN.
For the second straight year, the Operation Basketball media tipoff event will be held in Charlotte, where players and coaches can go directly to ESPN's studios.
The conference is developing and rebranding its digital network in an effort to reach as many fans as possible. Swofford said that many years ago the ACC enjoyed an advantage in exposure over other conferences because so many of its games were televised.
"In today's world, we have as many games on ... as you can possibly have on, but a lot of other conferences do too because of the numerous, multiple platforms that are out there to distribute games. Anything we can do collectively or institutionally to continue to promote the game itself, our teams, our players, our coaches, we will do."
The conference will have to do it without one of its most enthusiastic advocates. Williams played point guard at Maryland and took pride in the ACC's history and tradition.
During his farewell news conference Friday, he defended the ACC.
"The ACC has taken some knocks the last couple of years," Williams said, "but check who's won the most national championships the last 10 years. Check who's won the most NCAA tournament games the last 20 years."
At a time when many of the key faces in the conference are changing, ACC officials will meet this week to try to regain some of the momentum the conference seems to have lost.
