Letter to the ACC: It's Getting Old

Dear ACC,

With each passing season my disdain for you grows.  Like a little boy vying for his mother's attention, you constantly assault the airwaves with your unfounded and unwarranted dribble about being the best, most powerful, most competitive, and most attention-worthy conference.  Yet at the end of each season, you stand with your tail between your legs while your competitors laugh at your seemingly continuous collapses.

I somewhat feel ashamed to have written this letter.  What else could I expect from a conference that lists Mike Krzyzewski and Gary Williams as its leaders?  It seems that the foundation of your conference is built upon whining, crying and claiming foul play.

But where do these groundless demands for respect stem from?  What is the basis for these claims?  Yes, a team in your conference won the 2009 NCAA Tournament.  And that team did so in unbelievable fashion, winning every game by double digits.  But what about the rest?  Of the seven teams you sent to the Tournament, five lost in the first weekend, and four to lower seeds.  Duke, your pride and joy, the shining star of your pathetic conference has now been upset by teams from the Big East two years in a row, teams that ended the season ranked fourth or lower in the conference.  You have had only one program make the Final Four in the past five years, whereas the Big East and Big Ten boast three different programs each.  

Basketball is one thing, I am sure it is painful to watch those around you get stronger while you fall deeper into the wells of mediocrity.  But now football?  I sit here as a fan of Georgetown, a school that does not even field a Division I-A football team, enraged that you could suggest that the ACC is the best football conference.  Your ESPN cronies tickled your fancy by publishing this flapdoodle but seriously, do you actually think anyone can take these words seriously?

"If you really step back and take a look at the conferences a year ago, top to bottom, we may have well been the deepest conference in the country," [ACC Commissioner John] Swofford said. "What we didn't have is a team or two involved in the national championship race down the stretch. I think that has a lot to do with how our conference is perceived competitively, maybe more than it should."

Really Swoffy?  [Is cool if I call you Swoffy? No you say?  Ok screw you.]  Of the eight ACC teams that played bowls games against teams from other major conferences last year, only two won.  And one year later you have the nerve to suggest that your conference was the deepest?  

It seems to me that the main problem in your arguments for both basketball and football stem from the belief that parity equates to depth.  That somehow because every ACC team is able to beat every other ACC team, your conference the best.  But in reality there is a fundamental flaw in your logic.  You completely overlook the fact that the majority of your teams suck.  So your conference is really a prime example of a phenomenon known as crapity parity [crap-i-tee par-i-tee].  Where mediocre teams beat up on equally mediocre teams to compile mediocre records.  And these mediocre records are somehow, through the help of articles written by Mark Schlabach and his likes at ESPN, put through the ACC hype-machine and turned into spurious and trumped up claims of conference superiority.

So to Swoffy and the rest of the ACC clan, I close with a friendly reminder: You can only put your foot in your mouth so many times before choking.  

Good talk.