Can you feel it? Basketball is in the air and we are just a few short days away from ACC teams playing real basketball. It’s exciting to say the least. Though conference play is still a ways off, we thought it would be helpful to compile our pre-season look at each of the Atlantic Coast Conference’s twelve teams into one place, so that it will be easy to look up how totally wrong we were about the season, or conversely, to praise us for uncanny insight into the future. Yesterday we broke down the individual awards, but today, it’s all about the teams.  Here’s how we see everything shaking out, in terms of standings, conference records and postseason placement:

1. North Carolina (14-2) – NCAA top overall seed
2. Duke (11-5) – NCAA #3 seed
3. Florida State (10-6) – NCAA#3 seed
4. Miami (9-7) – NCAA #9 seed
5. Virginia (9-7) – NCAA #8 seed
6. NC State (8-8) – NCAA #12 seed
7. Virginia Tech (8-8) – NIT
8. Clemson (7-9) – NIT
9. Maryland (6-10)
10. Wake Forest (5-11)
11. Boston College (5-11)
12. Georgia Tech (4-12)

In short, we see North Carolina at the top with Florida State challenging Duke (more closely than might be imagined) for the second place spot. We like Miami, Virginia, and NC State to take leaps forward. While Wahoo and Wolfpack fans are probably happy that we see a return to the Tournament for their teams, we can’t offer that same degree of optimism for a Virginia Tech team that seems bound for just the wrong side of the bubble. Again. At the bottom of the standings, we see Wake Forest and Boston College doing slightly better than most, mostly due to our lack of confidence in this year’s Georgia Tech squad. We feel that Clemson and Maryland are due for down years and potential rebuilding growing pains, though if we had to name two teams whose performance in the conference we are the least sure of, we’d probably name those two. If you want to check out more storylines for the upcoming conference season, we’d refer you to the ACC Conference Primer which is chock full of information for this coming year and encourage you to get pumped for a dynamite season.

KCarpenter (269 Posts)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 9th, 2011 at 1:15 pm by KCarpenter and is filed under acc, microsites. Tagged: acc, boston college, clemson, duke, florida state, georgia tech, maryland, miami, nc state, north carolina, virginia, virginia tech, wake forest. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.