A Super ACC Tradition

A few ACC traditions endure. One is the Duke-North Carolina rivalry. The ACC Tournament at year’s end is another, although its stature has been lessened by the near-equal weight given to a first-place finish during the regular season.

The round-robin is gone. Playing the tournament in the heart of the region, where everyday fans can reach it easily and find affordable accommodations, is gone, certainly through the next two years in Brooklyn.

Maryland, a founding member of the ACC, is gone.

Gone, too, is the quaint notion the conference is an assemblage of like-minded, closeknit universities sharing high academic ideals.

At least we’ve still got an ACC game on Super Bowl Sunday.

The league and our national football holiday have been linked since an undefeated NC State squad led by David Thompson edged a comparably gifted Maryland team 87-85 in January 1973. The late score by the ACC’s greatest player, a tip of a missed shot at the buzzer, sealed the outcome in an unusual national telecast of a college game in that pre-cable, pre-dunk era.

The ACC contest brimmed with drama, in sharp contrast with the lackluster 14-7 Super Bowl that followed. The Miami Dolphins handily won Super Bowl VII despite the close final score, concluding the only undefeated NFL season (17-0) since the 1967 advent of the Game Of Multimillion Dollar Commercials.

The most memorable, and comic, play in that Super Bowl came when a 41-yard field goal try was blocked late in the game. The Dolphins’ left-footed kicker, Garabed “Garo” Yepremian, recovered and tried to pass the ball, only to have it intercepted and run back for a touchdown. That was it for scoring by Washington.

Last season, shortly after Miami took care of Georgia Tech in ACC action, the Super Bowl saw Denver dominate the Carolina Panthers and NFL Player of the Year Cam Newton. This year Clemson, the original ACC member that’s appeared least on Super Bowl Sunday, visits Florida State, making its tenth appearance as prelude to the Main Event.

The matchup reinforces some lingering imbalances in the ACC’s relationship with pro football’s big day.

Certainly it’s strange that Duke, with its competitive pedigree, has appeared prior to fewer Super Bowls than NC State (15), North Carolina (14), Maryland (11 while in the league), Florida State (10), Wake Forest (9), Virginia (9) and Georgia Tech (9).

NC State, at 10-5, remains the most successful and prolific ACC team playing in tandem with the Largest Halftime Show on Earth.

Four former Big East teams -- Boston College, Notre Dame, Syracuse, and Virginia Tech -- have yet to participate as ACC members in a prelude encounter for football’s Roman Numeral Extravaganza. BC and Virginia Tech have been in the ACC since the mid-2000s.

This coming weekend marks only the third time Clemson plays to precede the big party, with 20 years between appearances. NFC teams won both times the Tigers played the lower-profile prelim, with New England, one of this year’s Super Bowl entrants, serving as the AFC victim in 1997.

Atlanta, this season’s other Super contestant, lost in 1999 in its only previous trip to the top of the football heap. The same day, Wake Forest topped Maryland and UNC downed Georgia Tech.

New England is making its ninth Super Appearance in the ACC-prelude era, going 4-4 in its previous tries. Florida State played on four of those occasions, beating Miami in 2015 and Savannah State in 2004 and losing to UNC in 2005 and 2008.

FSU is enjoying its eighth Super Spot since 2003, the season Leonard Hamilton arrived at Tallahassee. That’s a remarkable rate of better than once every other year for 15 years -- including five of six Super Bowl Sundays between 2003 and 2008 -- and easily the best by any ACC member over that span.