How ACC Teams Structured Home Schedules For This Season

Miami, Notre Dame and Syracuse have a few extra factors working in their favor as they navigate their 2022-23 schedules.

Keep in mind that, while the league mandates the location and timing of regular-season ACC games, coaches have considerable influence on who, where and when they undertake nonconference competition prior to the turn of the year. (For those of you with a bent toward journalism, why is a more complex factor and how is a matter of the moment.)

Given those parameters, under-appreciated Irish coach Mike Brey again loaded up on home games, leading ACC squads with 20, half of them outside the league. Notre Dame also eased into 2022-23 action with five straight home games, more than any ACC team. The Irish won all five.

Those introductory Irish contests trail only the six straight home outings for Syracuse from Dec. 6 until the end of the calendar year. Might as well be snowed in.

Notre Dame and Syracuse, with strong support at home, habitually try to stay put as much as possible. Unfortunately, not even playing at the revamped JMA Wireless Dome (good-bye Carrier Dome) was total salve for Jim Boeheim’s fading program, which lost at home in November to lightweights Colgate and Bryant.

Attendance is more problematic at Coral Gables, where the Hurricanes were, as usual, last in seats occupied in 2022. Still, the Hurricanes understandably prefer hanging at home throughout late-fall and winter.

The Watsco Center is nestled in the warmest outpost in the ACC, after all, as recruits surely notice. (We remember fondly when the school attempted a gimmick with a courtside hot tub, quickly vetoed by the ACC. Try imagining that at the other geographic end of the conference.)

The Canes have a secret schedule strength too. Alone in recent memory they are blessed by playing two teams with the same name, each founded prior to the Civil War: St. Francis College of New York and St. Francis University of Pennsylvania.

Miami already took care of the Brooklyn version, 79-56, on Nov. 23. Members of the Northeast Conference (NEC), the Terriers bit Jim Larranaga’s squad at the start of the 2013-14 season. This autumn the school moved into a high rise at the heart of Brooklyn.

Pennsylvania’s pastoral St. Francis, the Red Flash, also with a losing 2022 record and likewise a member of the NEC, faces Miami on Dec. 17. Both Northeast schools come south to play.

Then there’s the University of St. Francis in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The NAIA’s Cougars are not on Miami’s schedule this year, but we couldn’t help mentioning them.

Giovanni di Petro di Bernardone, alias St. Francis of Assisi, is among the most venerated Catholic saints according to Wikipedia. He founded the Franciscan orders about 800 years ago and in November 1979 was anointed the patron saint of ecology. He is especially associated with birds and animals. Anticipating how haltingly and selfishly many 21^st century leaders are reacting to climate change, he preached that the world was created good and beautiful but, says Wikipedia, “suffers a need for redemption because of human sin.”