Maybe it’s some kind of viral or bACCterial infection. Maybe someone will develop a vACCination that can end the apparent debilitating effects caused by ACC expansion.

Then again, maybe not.

The malaise has affected ACC basketball, which immediately suffered the demise of round robin, regular season competition once expansion occurred. The elimination of that leveling gauntlet created uneven and unfair competitive changes.

This season, for instance, neither Duke nor North Carolina plays home and home against Georgia Tech or Wake Forest. Florida State, Virginia Tech, and Wake Forest don’t have to play at Cameron Indoor Stadium. Georgia Tech, Miami, and Virginia don’t venture to the Smith Center. Certainly there are advantages gained and lost in such arrangements.

It’s likely a coincidence, but since the league went to a dozen members its teams have been shut out of consecutive Final Fours, the longest drought since 1979 and 1980.

But the real tumult has occurred in ACC football, for which expansion was undertaken.

“I think just the stature that the league received from Virginia Tech, Miami and BC really kind of helped our image as a conference,” Wake Forest coach Jim Grobe said. “We’d always been seen primarily as a basketball conference. When we added those guys to the league we instantly got a lot of pop because of the teams that we brought in made us a stronger football conference.”

So far the results simply have not borne out that assessment.

Two previously powerful programs, Florida State and Miami, have slipped badly. Six programs changed head coaches in the past two years. And the league failed to post a winning record in bowl competition for the third time in four post-expansion seasons.

This year Miami suffered its first losing record in a decade. Florida State finished 7-6 for the second straight time, the worst run of Bobby Bowden’s 31-year tenure at Tallahassee.

Virginia Tech dropped its third bowl game in four tries as an ACC member, losing the Orange Bowl to Kansas. The Hokies, fifth-ranked when they met the Jayhawks, may yet finish in the top 10 in the final AP poll. No other ACC football team has ranked so high since expansion.

Rather than lift all boats, expansion predictably raised the stakes instead.

Four coaching changes followed the 2006 season – at Boston College, Miami, North Carolina, and N.C. State. Two more firings hit Duke and Georgia Tech immediately after the 2007 regular season. Chan Gailey never won fewer than seven games with the Yellow Jackets, but that was not enough to protect his job.

The ACC finished 2-6 in 2007 bowl competition, the first time in seven years its members failed to at least break even in postseason play. FSU is the only ACC team that has won a Bowl Championship Series game, and that came following the 1999 season.

No wonder a USA Today/Gallup poll taken in November 2007 found that, of the six power conferences, fans rated only the Big East as weaker than the ACC over the past decade.

Oddly, the greatest beneficiary of ACC football’s changed environment is Wake Forest, which over the past two seasons won 20 games, captured an ACC title, and twice appeared in bowls.

The Demon Deacons, along with Boston College, were the only ACC squads that won bowl games this year. (Three of four ACC teams that didn’t make it to postseason came from the Triangle.)

Wake coach Jim Grobe admitted his first reaction to expansion was that “it’s going to make our job a little bit harder.” Instead, he found it widened his program's recruiting horizons, especially in Florida, yielding starting quarterback Riley Skinner and All-ACC cornerback Alphonso Smith, among others.

“So, on one hand, I think it made our job a little tougher because we’ve got some really good teams added to the league,” Grobe said. “But, on the other hand, I think it helped our recruiting. I think we’re bringing in better players because of that, so what looked like a negative starting out has really become a positive for us at Wake Forest.”

Other schools would do well to exploit the ACC’s altered football landscape in a manner similar to Wake. Even if they do, with six head coaches trying to refresh or sustain programs, it may take a few years for the effects to be felt. What’s more, extended mediocrity may soon need to be addressed at Florida State and perhaps Maryland, creating further instability.

But building carefully and preaching patience is preferable to claiming prowess that simply does not exist.

ACC football was inferior prior to expansion. Bolstering the membership has not proven to be an instant panacea. The sooner adherents talk of adjusting to new realities, rather than persist in claiming bogus strength, the sooner the ACC will be positioned to earn its proper due.