ACC basketball schedule needs to change

The ACC convenes in Amelia Island, Fla., Sunday for its annual spring meetings, and there’s little chance of major changes by the end of the main business session on Wednesday.

That’s too bad. One change the league should make is to the unwieldy basketball schedule, with 16 league games among the 12 teams.

Gone are the days in which every team played everyone twice.

Instead, we have the current schedule that leads to odd situations like N.C. State only playing Duke once in the regular season for two out of three years.

The league sets its conference schedule in three-year cycles. The coming season is the first of that cycle.

The league could change it for the coming year, but there are factors working against that. The primary one is that the league's contracts are pointed toward 2011, when the ACC’s current television contracts expire. The ACC-Big Ten Challenge is also under contract through that season, meaning the league enters negotiations with all sorts of options available.

Moving to 18 conference games then would make the television package more valuable to potential television partners. A league game, of course, is more compelling than watching N.C. State play Presbyterian.

If that’s the case, why not make the change now?

Standing pat means three more years of a schedule with Duke playing Maryland twice but not its rival down the road.

And it means three more years of North Carolina in a different orbit than Wake Forest.

Does this make sense?

Of course not.

Change can be slow in coming. Many ACC coaches are opposed because they’d rather have more control over their nonconference schedule. But limiting the conference schedule certainly hasn’t helped the league’s NCAA chances.

The time for change has come.

Unfortunately, that change may not happen until 2011.