ACC owed Greensboro another chance to host a tournament. In 2023, we’ll see if it belongs
The ACC was always going back to Greensboro, not only because it owed the city another chance after this March’s tournament was wiped out by COVID-19, but because the future of the ACC basketball tournament remains in a holding pattern.
The conference on Tuesday awarded the 2023 tournament to Greensboro, and that’s as far out as the ACC has gone, with Washington already in the queue for 2021 and a third trip to Brooklyn, N.Y., in 2022.
“The partnership between the ACC and the city of Greensboro is extremely special, and one that has spanned nearly seven decades,” ACC Commissioner John Swofford said in a statement. “The decision to bring the ACC Men’s Basketball Tournament back to the Greensboro Coliseum was the right thing to do and we look forward to returning in 2023.”
Where the ACC goes in the years beyond 2022 was going to depend on how things went in Greensboro in 2020, because so many league administrators weren’t around the last time the tournament was in Greensboro, back in 2015 for the 26th time. Six of the league’s 15 presidents and eight of its athletic directors have taken office since then, and only six of those 14 could be said to have roots in the traditional ACC.
As the conference’s makeup has changed, so has the traditional imperative to take the tournament to Greensboro, not only the location of the ACC’s headquarters and in the heart of its most fervid fan bases, but always the best location for the tournament inside the building’s walls.
But Greensboro lacks the cosmopolitan amenities of bigger, more recent hosts such as Washington (2016), New York (2017 and 2018) and Charlotte (2019) — especially, in the case of D.C. and Charlotte, the immediate areas outside and around the arenas. That dynamic has become more important since the ACC shifted from a Saturday afternoon-Sunday afternoon finish to Friday and Saturday nights, leaving fans with two long days to fill before games.
Swofford has indicated the future rotation will include those three cities, but the former Big East schools — and even some of the new presidents and ADs at older ACC members — have yet to agree to include Greensboro.
Initially, the ACC was hesitant to extend the tournament rotation too deep into the future because it had designs of getting into Madison Square Garden instead of Brooklyn’s Barclays Center. But the Big East secured those coveted dates through 2028 when it signed an extension with MSG in December 2018, at which point the only variable in the ACC’s future plans was an on-site, live assessment of the Greensboro Coliseum this March.
That was cut short before it ever really got started, with only six of the scheduled 13 games played and the tournament canceled because of concerns over the spread of the novel coronavirus only minutes before the first quarterfinal was scheduled to take place, already in an empty arena without fans. None of the top four seeds ever played a game, and the tournament’s fate was sealed when Duke told the ACC hours before its scheduled quarterfinal that it was unilaterally suspending all athletic competition, basketball included.
Swofford awarded regular-season champion Florida State the championship trophy in an impromptu center-court ceremony shortly after, and that was the end of Greensboro’s chance to shine.
“My heart bleeds for Greensboro,” Swofford said that morning, when he still hoped the tournament would be played.
There was no circumstance in which Greensboro wasn’t going to get another chance to show it still belonged in the tournament rotation in the modern, geographically scattered, 15-team ACC. Everything that rode on a successful showing in 2020 will still be riding on 2023: Nothing less than Greensboro’s chance to get another shot after that.
This story was originally published April 28, 2020 at 12:13 PM.
