North Carolina, ranked No. 1 in the national baseball polls, is the No. 3 seed for the ACC tournament, where the Tar Heels will be the second-highest seed in the Division B bracket.

Clear enough?

It takes a sound, analytical mind to decipher all the inner workings of the ACC Baseball Championship, which begins today at the Baseball Grounds of Jacksonville -- the fanciful name of the baseball park in downtown Jacksonville, Fla.

N.C. State and Georgia Tech open the tournament at 10 a.m., which will mean 6 o'clock wakeup calls and a 7 a.m. team breakfast. The Wolfpack, the tournament's No. 4 seed, and Yellow Jackets are in the Division A bracket with No. 1 seed Miami and No. 8 Clemson, who play at 1 p.m. today.

The Tar Heels, the defending champions, face Virginia at 8 p.m. in the fourth game of the day. No. 2 seed Florida State and Wake Forest, the other two teams in the B bracket, play at 5 p.m.

Each team will play the other three in its bracket. The two teams with the best bracket records face off Sunday in a 1 p.m. game to decide the ACC title.

Will the Pack be fully awake today at 10 o'clock?

"It doesn't bother me at all," Wolfpack outfielder Jeremy Synan said Tuesday. "I've played AAU ball, and we had all different times.

"I'm ready. The team's ready. We are ready to go."

The Pack (37-18) last won an ACC championship in 1992. But State, runner-up to Florida State in the ACC's Atlantic Division, may have the arms -- starter Clayton Shunick and reliever Jimmy Gillheeney were chosen to the All-ACC first team -- and enough hitting to make a run at a title.

"I know we're a tight-knit team and we believe in one another and have a lot of confidence in one another," NCSU coach Elliott Avent said. "And we're led by a lot of veterans who know what to do in certain situations."

State already has made a formal bid to host an NCAA baseball regional next week at Doak Field, and a strong ACC tournament could help. The NCAA baseball committee will announce the 16 regional sites on Sunday and the tournament field Monday.

The Heels (45-10), after taking two of three from Miami last weekend, supplanted the Hurricanes as No. 1 in the national polls. But Miami won the Coastal Division -- and two of three games from FSU -- in claiming the No. 1 seed for the tournament.

UNC coach Mike Fox, who has taken the Heels to the College World Series the past two seasons, likes the look and feel of his team heading into the tournament.

"I think as the year went on I kept thinking, 'You know, I think we've got a chance to be OK,' " Fox said. "Then our pitching was so solid and our bullpen just got better and better and I'm looking at these young pitchers and I'm thinking, 'Wow, we've got a chance to be pretty good.'

"That's hard for me to say because I'm always their biggest critic. You're always looking at your team for where their weaknesses are, because that's what you want to try to improve. But I like this team."

UNC is expected to host an NCAA regional at the USA Baseball National Training Complex in Cary and probably a Super Regional if it advances. But the Heels, whose ACC title last year was their first since 1990, won't get caught looking ahead, third baseman Chad Flack said.

"Our team, the way it is, we all hate losing ... no matter where we're playing, who we're playing," he said. "So from that point, we would really be disappointed if we didn't win [the ACC]."

As for the College World Series, Flack added, "We know how hard it is to get there and what it takes, and we not only enjoy going to Omaha, but the road it takes to get there."

(Staff writers Robbi Pickeral and A.J. Carr contributed to this report.)