GREENSBORO, N.C. — Sometimes, the true beauty of the ACC tournament isn’t the high-powered slugfests between potential national title contenders or rivalry rubber matches. It’s the teams that mess that up, the chaos agents that wreak havoc on the best laid plans of ESPN while bursting everyone else’s bubble.
That doesn’t necessarily have to mean winning it — although it did for Virginia Tech last year — but an ACC team that knocks out a few contenders and ruins the seasons of a few others can make for a more entertaining week than a much-anticipated battle of top-10 teams on Friday or Saturday night.
N.C. State did it in 1997 and 2007. Maryland did it in 2004. North Carolina did it in 2015, and the Hokies did it last year, rolling to the title as the seventh seed while putting what appeared to be yet another nail in the Tar Heels’ season (plot twist!) and denying Mike Krzyzewski an ACC championship in his Duke farewell.
And nobody has a better chance to do it again this week in Greensboro than Virginia Tech.
Again.
Whether the Hokies are capable or not remains to be seen, but there’s no doubting the opportunity.
In the space of four days, Virginia Tech could end Mike Brey’s career, send N.C. State to the NIT, send Clemson to the NIT, send North Carolina to the NIT, and it wouldn’t matter then what happens Saturday because the building would already be a smoldering ruin.
“When I saw the matchup, we obviously have assumed our position and we accept responsibility,” Notre Dame coach Brey said. “But when I saw who we played, I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’”
There are a lot of presumptions inherent in there — that Brey is really retiring (he’s left the door open to coaching again), that N.C. State isn’t already safely on the right side of the bubble (the Wolfpack should be OK either way, although very nervous with a loss), that Clemson isn’t already consigned to the NIT (the Tigers might still need to win this thing), that North Carolina isn’t ticketed for Dayton (that’s the sound of TruTV execs salivating), and that Virginia Tech is even capable of such a run (this hasn’t been the same VT team as last year).
Analytically speaking, Virginia Tech had a slightly better chance to win the ACC last year (8.1 percent) than get to Saturday this year (6.2 percent) per the estimates of the estimable Ken Pomeroy. Which is to say, unlikely, but not impossible.
But it’s also a little bit surprising to see a team that was ranked for two weeks in December show up in Greensboro on a Tuesday with the Louisvilles of the world, and the Hokies are the only team playing on the first day of the ACC tournament that has a winning record overall.
It’s a predicament that had Virginia Tech coach Mike Young literally banging his head against the wall Monday.
“You are what your record says you are,” Young said. “And we are 8-12, pal. We’re 8-12. Here’s where we are: We’re playing Notre Dame.”
Still, the Hokies are the kind of destabilizing factor that has the potential to turn everything upside down, and the right dominoes are in line to fall that could take the ACC from a best-case seven NCAA tournament bids to a worst-case four, and Virginia Tech has its finger on the one that starts it all.
In a season when the ACC feels very compressed, top to bottom, when there’s no looming No. 1 seed Sunday, the one constant is likely to be chaos — with Virginia Tech its avatar.
