ACC vs. SEC Basketball: Team Performances in Conference Rivalry Games

Football teams are generally easier to break down historically because everything is saved neatly on cfbdatawarehouse.com. Basketball records, however, are usually only in one place - media guides. And the accuracy and verifiability of media guides is pretty suspect. Some teams have awful media guides (I'm looking at you Wake Forest) that are missing huge chunks of information. Either way, I broke out all 24 SEC and ACC media guides in order to tabulate the performance of every ACC-SEC out of conference match up since the Bobby Cremins' era (per Winfield's request).

The ACC has played 312 games against the SEC since Cremins' first season at Georgia Tech (1981-1982) and has on 55.4% of the games. Half the conference is above 0.500 against SEC foes while the other half is below 0.500. The SEC is less fortunate. Only 3 teams are above 0.500 against the SEC in this span. Georgia Tech and Georgie have played the most inter-conference games during this span at 56 and 57 games, respectively. This primarily attributed to the fact that FSU wasn't in the ACC until the 1991-1992 season and South Carolina wasn't in the SEC until the 1991-1992 season. This cut the ACC-SEC-ness of the Clemson-USC and FSU-UF series in half.


Virginia has met the most SEC teams since Cremins' first season (11). On the opposite side of the aisle, Kentucky has met ten different ACC affiliated teams since the 1981-1982 season.


Yes, it is correct that Georgie has a winning record in ACC play since Cremins joined Tech. This is because Tech has struggled for God-knows-what-reason against the dogs since 1981 (14-17 record) despite having a huge talent advantage, playing in more NCAA tournaments, and having much more coaching stability.

I know this is irrelevant to the Clemson game tonight but I couldn't really think of much to write about the game tonight so I went in a different direction.