Some ACC coaches believe that talks about a 20 game league schedule may be coming soon.
At the ACC annual spring meetings, the league's head coaches spent a considerable amount of time talking about scheduling, according to the Charlotte Observer. While changes don't seem imminent, there are coaches on both sides of the debate of whether to increase the league schedule to 20 games.
The ACC expanded the conference schedule to 18 games at the beginning of the 2012-2013 season in anticipation of the league moving from 12 to 15 teams. Of the 18 games, eight of them are played as part of home-and-home series, four of which belong to permanent scheduling partners. An inequity is created when lower-tier teams have to player better teams twice or when elite teams only need to face each other once. By expanding to 20 games, more teams can play twice, creating a schedule slightly more resembling a round robin.
It also allows for the continuation of rivalries that have been swept aside by the league's membership growth -- something that's a larger concern for the ACC's original teams who were very used to facing one another twice a year for decades.
Expanding to 20 games certainly won't fix scheduling issues, but it might provide a more competitive playing field within the conference, and at least fix some of those aforementioned rivalries too. With coaches like Mark Gottfried of NC State supporting the expansion and UNC's Roy Williams and others saying that it won't make a difference, this discussion is far from over. Obviously a month after the league set a record for Sweet 16 participants and placed two squads in the Final Four, it's not the easiest sell to change things. But maybe in the future, it'll be an easier discussion to see both sides of.
