ACC Debuts Aren’t Always As Successful As This Year

With 15 ACC teams it would be difficult to go through a series of season openers without a stumble or two. Or three, as it turned out last season.

This year the real possibility of defeat was present in two games against elite clubs. The rest were relatively easy debuts, although Wake’s opening loss to Georgia Southern last November shows the tenuousness of such assumptions.

Duke faced Kentucky and defeated the Wildcats with surprising ease, 118-84, on Nov. 6 in the Champions Classic at Indianapolis, a neutral court in name only that’s about 190 miles from the UK campus. (Think Duke playing Kentucky in Charlotte.) In what might pass for the season-opening, big-name doubleheader some crave in college basketball to match football, Kansas faced Michigan State in the earlier, 7PM game.

Down in Tallahassee on the same day, Florida visited Florida State in an annual rivalry contest that could have quickly test FSU’s ability to follow up on last year’s Elite Eight advance. Didn’t happen as Florida State beat the Gators handily, 81-60.

This year North Carolina was the only ACC team to open on the road – at the unfortunately named Richardson Indoor Stadium at Wofford, the alma mater of the disgraced, deposed, former owner of the Carolina Panthers. He paid for the building. The Tar Heels avenged last season’s upset in Chapel Hill, winning 78-67.

Carolina’s early intrepidity, uncommon for any ACC team, was matched last year only by Pitt. The Panthers lost at Navy in what presaged one of the worst seasons ever by an ACC member (8-24) and the last under Kevin Stallings.

In their next outing, the Midshipmen lost by 30 at Miami.

The Pitt stop was perhaps the biggest road shock in an ACC opener since Virginia’s loss in 2013 at George Mason.

One might argue the honor for worst recent loss in an opener goes to NC State after its home defeat by William & Mary in 2015-16, a stumble made more costly by an ankle injury that sidelined shooter Terry Henderson for the season.

ACC teams have endured other opening embarrassments on friendly floors in the past few years: Virginia Tech dropped a matchup with Alabama State at Blacksburg in 2015-16, and Boston College was bested by Nicholls State at home last season.

Last year was the third in the past six in which ACC teams lost three openers, along with 2013 and 2014.