ACC Spring Meetings: A Bit Different This Year

The ACC’s spring meeting must have been very strange: no Coach K but plenty of challenges.

Obviously the perception of a very off-year was discussed even though the ACC proved itself worthy in the post-season.

And part of that was marketing. Mike Brey had some interesting ideas on that front, including some things that would have seemed intrusive not too long ago: mics on players, cameras in the locker room and so forth.

Seth Greenberg echoed those comments, saying that he’d like to see more media access.

We’d like to see a few things too. For one, we’d like to see the conference reallllly push the envelope with the ACC Network. Take some chances, do some crazy things. We think that’d be great. The ACCN is okay but it’s pretty bland. We’ll come back to that in a few minutes.

We’d also like to see something like a holiday invitational. Why not? It worked brilliantly when the Big Four did the Dixie Classic. There’s not a lot going on at Christmas. That’d be a huge event, and especially if the conference was fearless.

And we’d like to see the ACC set up a conference-wide recruiting service.

We know that every school lavishes money on recruiting. It’s critical. But what if you had people who just bird-dogged and sent the information out to every school? No one else is doing anything like that. It could be a useful edge, especially if those guys traveled less-visited trails and found some under-rated jewels.

Fundamentally though, Brey is right: branding is critical. One of the best ways to do that is social media and if you combined that with the ACCN, you might really be on to something. It could be difficult, possibly offensive at times, but a one-way media won’t work anymore. It needs to flow freely and the more people who are interested, the better it would get.

We listen to some podcasts where members of the audience are regulars. Why not something like that? And we can promise you this - if you take someone relatively normal and make them into a - well, let’s say a person who is appreciated and celebrated - that person is going to tell all of his friends, who will think it’s exceedingly cool and then tell their friends.

You just can’t get that with the ACCN sending stuff out from on high.

The age of TV is over. The age of the Orcs is...oh, never mind. But you probably get the basic idea.

Finally, Brey and Jeff Capel rather suspect that the NCAA is just looking to make an example out of some school that pushes NIL too far. For his part, Capel is determined that it not be Pitt.

Finally finally, we’d love to know how new Duke coach Jon Scheyer was perceived at this since it’s his first rodeo if you will.