Lately, it has been the Colonial Athletic Association with a better television deal. (Oooh, that's cold -- until you remember which league has reached the Final Four most recently.) Just shouting, "We're the ACC!" every March doesn't cut it anymore.
Or, as one West Virginia fan across from the scorer's table sang in the final minutes of the Duke game: "O-ver-ra-ted!"
Figuring out what went wrong would help -- and though it's hard to draw a straight line from one to another, one can say this much: Before it made its money/power grab in 2005 and raided the Big East for its football heavyweights, it was the conference we've always known. Since then, the numbers don't lie.
Before the expanded league went into action in 2005-06, the ACC had won three of the previous five national titles and had earned three other Final Four berths in that span.
Same old dominance, different era. In the last pre-expansion season, six teams got in the field, three made the Sweet 16 and North Carolina won it all.
In the next two seasons? No Final Four teams. Just three reaching the Sweet 16.
Throughout this season, the ACC was ranked the best in the country, and its coaches used that to proclaim that their own mediocre records should be graded on some kind of curve.
If you had listened to them -- and Seth "Certifiably Insane" Greenberg, we're talking to you -- and chosen not to believe your eyes, you wouldn't have noticed that the ACC was top-heavy this season with nothing close to the depth of the Big East, Pacific-10 or even the Big 12.
The selection committee believed its own eyes, although it still had a blind spot for Duke, grandfathering it into a No. 2 seed. But not for Greenberg's Virginia Tech team, the only serious bubble team once Maryland jumped off.
As for the ones who made it? Scoreboard.
So now, who can deny today that the ACC -- in the number of invitations and in the "progress" it made through this field -- got just what it deserved?
david.steele@baltsun.com
Listen to David Steele on Wednesdays at 9 a.m. on WNST (1570 AM).
