The ACC And Super Bowl Sunday

Talk about a handsome going-away present, arguably even better than a custom-designed Louisville slugger or a handmade rocking chair.

Sadly, for the second straight season the linkage is broken between a featured ACC men’s basketball game and the playing of the NFL’s Super Bowl. But there will be a link of sorts. Super Bowl LVI will be played on Feb. 13, Mike Krzyzewski’s LXXV birthday.

As we know, the man with more wins than anyone in college basketball history has announced 2022 is his final season as Duke coach. The Chicago Bears fan’s teams were 3-3 in contests preceding the NFL championship game.

This will also be the latest Super Bowl ever in the calendar year, the season propelled toward spring by the addition of a wearing and largely meaningless — but lucrative — 17^th regular-season game for the NFL and its financial partners.

This is the first time since 1991 that, presumably because the Super Bowl is being held in mid-February, the year’s first meeting in the Duke-Carolina basketball series is being played before the Main Single-Day Sports Event of 2022.

Meanwhile the ACC has chosen to forgo its once-prominent Super Bowl tie, whose historic nature received scant attention anyway from the conference, its TV water-carriers, other media, and sponsors. This scheduling choice is consistent with a quiet practice of avoiding Sunday games in calendar year 2022.

Just another example of ACC traditions fading fast.

The round-robin is gone. Keeping league headquarters in Greensboro, a constant since the ACC’s founding nearly 70 years ago, is under active review. The postseason ACC Tournament continues in an elongated version, this year wandering to Brooklyn, that hotbed of ACC devotion.

The pool of commonality with the NFL has similarly grown increasingly shallow, the drought now the longest since 1984 and 1985.

The ACC’s bond with the Super Bowl dates to January 1973. That year two great ACC teams met first: undefeated and second-ranked NC State led by David Thompson and Tom Burleson, which edged a No. 3 Maryland team spearheaded by Tom McMillen, John Lucas and Len Elmore, 87-85. Thompson, the ACC’s greatest player to date, tipped in a miss at the buzzer to seal the outcome in a rare national college telecast in that pre-dunk, pre-cable era.

When contemporary college players artfully and routinely set up big men for lob-dunks, recall the still-electrifying move started with the 6-4 Thompson, the three-time ACC player of the year (1973-75), fed by guard Monte Towe.

Given the formidable stature of the opponent, the Wolfpack’s win at Maryland also marked a crucial step in maintaining the second and last unblemished season record in conference history. On probation in 1972-73, NC State was banned from amplifying its 27-0 mark in postseason play. Previously UNC turned in a 32-0 record in winning the 1957 NCAA championship.

The ‘73 ACC contest brimmed with drama, in sharp contrast to the lackluster Super Bowl VII that followed. The Miami Dolphins won handily despite a deceptive 14-7 final score, concluding the only undefeated NFL season (17-0) since the 1967 advent of the Game Of Multimillion Dollar Commercials.

Washington, now the Commanders (Commies?), remains among 10 competitors that failed to score in double digits in the first LIV Super Bowls. So do the LA Rams. In the 2019 game at Atlanta their supposedly groundbreaking offense was outplayed by Tom Brady and New England and tallied a measly field goal.

Jared Goff, then LA’s featured quarterback of the future, was traded away in Jan. 2021. Now the Rams play behind talented retread Matthew Stafford, an escapee from the Detroit Lions, in the eighth L.A.-area Super Bowl.

Back on the collegiate side NC State, at 10-5, remains the most successful and prolific ACC team playing in tandem with the Largest Halftime Show on Earth. That despite not appearing as a Super accouterment since 2008.

Boston College’s 2018 inclusion in the day’s warmup game reduced to four (Louisville, Notre Dame, Syracuse, and Virginia Tech) the number of former Big East teams that have yet to participate as ACC members in Super Festivities.

Pitt head coach Jeff Capel twice played for Duke on Super Sundays, splitting with Maryland as an upperclassman in 1996 and 1997. NFC teams followed with wins both times.

NC State participated in five of the ACC’s Super Hors D’Oeuvre encounters at the L.A. Coliseum or Rose Bowl. The Wolfpack won in ’73 and ’93, lost in 1977, 1980 and 1987.

Super Bowl LVI is slated for Inglewood, California’s brand-new Sofi Stadium, a nice boost for the Rams. The franchise won one previous Super Bowl, in 1999, before betraying the fans of St. Louis and returning to LA, which it had betrayed previously to relocate to Missouri.

A recent legal settlement required owner Stan Kroenke and the NFL to pay a nearly $800 million penalty for the manner in which they fled their once-welcome Midwestern home.

Long-languishing Cincinnati is 0-2 in Super competition, losing in 1982 and 1989. Virginia won on the same day the Bengals lost in Michigan’s Pontiac Dome in ’82 and Georgia Tech dropped a two-overtime encounter with Illinois in 1989. San Francisco was the NFL champ both times.

The Rams in both their incarnations are 1-3 in the Super Bowl, their sole victory coming in 2000 after Virginia defeated Wake Forest.