Understanding The ACC Baseball Tournament
May 20, 2007 | Baseball
May 20, 2007
By Adam Lucas
The ACC Tournament will be played using a new format this year. The 2007 event will feature two 4-team brackets and a one-game championship game on Sunday. Carolina begins play on Wednesday at 1 p.m. against Georgia Tech. The Tar Heel Sports Network audio for all Carolina games in Jacksonville will be available free through TarHeelBlue.com. For a listing of each game time, click here.
Why the new format?
The old double-elimination format was extremely taxing on pitching and didn't lend itself to providing the best title game. Teams surviving until the championship round were usually forced to use something less than their front-line starters. Under the new format, every team is guaranteed at least three games and the two teams in the title game will be playing just their fourth game of the event. The Big XII Conference used the same format in 2006 with good results.
How are the brackets set?
The two division champions (Florida State in the Atlantic and Carolina in the Coastal) are given the top two seeds. The remaining six seeds are filled in--without regard to division--according to conference winning percentage. Only the top eight teams participate in the 2007 ACC Tournament. This year's seeds are as follows:
1: FSU
2: Carolina
3: Virginia
4: Clemson
5: Miami
6: NC State
7: Georgia Tech
8: Wake Forest
Once the seeds are set, the eight-team tournament is divided into two brackets: seeds 1, 4, 5, and 8 in one bracket; seeds 2, 3, 6, and 7 in the other bracket.
How are game times and opponents determined?
The ACC sets the game times and opponents. The league has the right to schedule game times that take into account the proximity of the participating teams (in other words, teams located closer to Jacksonville are more likely to play later in the evening) in order to help attendance.
Each 4-team bracket plays a complete round-robin schedule beginning Wednesday. Four games will be played Wednesday. The 1/4/5/8 bracket has an off day Thursday, meaning just Carolina's bracket plays on Thursday. The Tar Heels' off day comes on Friday, when only the 1/4/5/8 bracket will play. All eight teams will play again on Saturday.
But what happens if there's a tie between teams in a bracket at the end of round-robin play?
That triggers a somewhat complex series of tiebreakers. It's easy if just two teams are tied--the team that won the head-to-head matchup in the ACC Tournament will advance to the championship game on Sunday.
If three teams are tied, it gets more complicated. The tiebreakers in that scenario are as follows:
A. The team with the best overall conference winning percentage in regular season play advances.
. The team with the best head-to-head conference winning percentage among the tied teams in regular season play (assuming all teams were common regular season opponents) advances.
C. The team with the highest seed advances.
If multiple teams tie and the tie can be reduced to two teams, then the two-team tiebreaker is used.
Adam Lucas's third book on Carolina basketball, The Best Game Ever, chronicles the 1957 national championship season and is available now. His previous books include Going Home Again, focusing on Roy Williams's return to Carolina, and Led By Their Dreams, a collaboration with Steve Kirschner and Matt Bowers on the 2005 championship team.