Basketball Schedule Preview: Conference

There’s nothing really crazy going on with the conference schedule here. Only one game (UNC at home) comes before the end of the non-conference schedule so we won’t have much idea until January how the season is going to go. For the third year in a row the ACC looks like they’re going to have a down year. This could be another chance for GT to win a lot of ACC games if they slightly outperform expectations.

This year the Jackets get UNC, Notre Dame, VT, Miami, Clemson, and BC twice and everyone else once. BC is predicted to be last in the conference. UNC is predicted to be pretty good as are VT and ND. Miami and Clemson are predicted to be in the middle/back of the conference along with GT. This is a mixed group that is pretty average.

In general this schedule starts out very tough and gets easier throughout the season. The toughest stretch is probably right at the beginning of the schedule with Syracuse at the Carrier Dome followed by Louisville at home and Duke at Cameron and a home game against Notre Dame. The easiest stretch is probably the trio of home games against Wake Forest, Florida State, and Miami right in the middle of the schedule.

One thing I’m not looking forward to is every televised game talking about Mike Krzyzewski’s last season. That is going to be incessant.

All in all this is a pretty standard ACC schedule. No real surprises. In general human prognosticators tend to think the ACC will be better than the computers do, but either way this should be yet another down year in the ACC. That gives some opportunity for Pastner to rack up some more ACC wins and with a good year it’s not too crazy to think that they go .500 or better for the third year in a row.