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Shortly after his Virginia Cavaliers defeated Florida State to win the ACC Tournament, Brian O’Connor told the media how proud he was of his team for winning the nation’s toughest conference. It was an opinion expressed by every ACC coach this season, last season and the season before that. It’s not an unreasonable assertion. Five ACC teams are hosting regional action this week in the NCAA Tournament, more than any conference.Virginia, North Carolina and Florida State are top-eight seeds, meaning they’ll host next week in the super-regionals if they advance out of this week. Six to eight consecutive home games is a nice prescription for advancement.
The ACC has had All-America players, hall of fame coaches, big victories galore and championships so close they could practically be tasted. But hanging over all that success is one undeniably gloomy fact. The nation’s self-proclaimed best conference has not won a College World Series since Eisenhower’s first term, since Elvis Presley was a young pup, since Mickey Mantle’s first great year.
That’s 1955, 56 years ago if you’re counting. So any assessment of the ACC’s postseason aspirations has to keep in mind one basic question. Is this team good enough to end the drought? We’ll start today by looking at the ACC’s best bets to find success in Omaha, its five regional top seeds. Tomorrow we’ll look at the league’s other tournament participants.