ACC playing with basketball fire, again. It still has chance to avoid getting burned

The losses are piling up again, to teams that no ACC team should ever lose to, under any circumstance.

Colgate (again). Loyola Marymount. Stetson. Troy. Maine. Tarleton State. Bellarmine. Wright State. Appalachian State. Seven of them in ACC buildings! You’d expect a Power Five conference to drop a couple of those, but nine is a lot. Too many.

It’s easy to look at that list and feel last year’s nasty November suddenly very close at hand and scream, “It’s happening all over again!” like this is the sequel to a bad horror movie nobody wanted.

Last year’s nonconference struggles ended up costing the ACC at least one and probably two NCAA tournament berths come March – three of the ACC’s five entrants ended up in the Elite 8, but Virginia Tech needed to win the title to get in and Wake Forest and Virginia both stayed home with 20-plus wins – but it’s not time to hit the panic button on ACC basketball again. Not yet, anyway. What’s happened so far is easily explained.

The good teams have plugged away, not always impressively, but still. The possible pretenders in the middle of the pack are sorting themselves out – in the worst way for short-handed Florida State, victimized by injuries and a vindictive NCAA suspension. And the obvious also-rans like Louisville, which has lost three times by a combined three points, were almost certain to struggle.

The teams at the top are going to be fine. Duke and North Carolina will get better, as Duke and North Carolina tend to do, and PK85 tournament wins this week over Gonzaga and Michigan State, respectively, would do a lot to burnish the ACC’s reputation but would hardly be catastrophic losses. Virginia is once again Virginia, doing Virginia things under difficult circumstances. Notre Dame, Miami and Virginia Tech all appear to be who we thought they were so far.

You can suffer losses to good mid-majors like Charleston – which beat Virginia Tech after giving North Carolina everything it could handle – because that’ll look decent enough on a teamsheet at the end of the season. But it’s the others that sting, and the nightmare scenario for the ACC is Florida State stumbling through the first two months, getting healthy and going 13-7 or something in the ACC, wrecking hopes and dreams along the way.

Because as long as the top half of the ACC – which could include some or all of N.C. State, Wake Forest and Clemson, and who can really tell with Syracuse these days? – takes care of business against Louisville and Florida State and Pittsburgh and Boston College and Georgia Tech, the damage can be minimized. That was part of the problem last season: The ACC’s really bad teams didn’t just beat up on each other.

Boston College beat Notre Dame and Virginia Tech and Wake Forest, the last in Brooklyn putting the end to the Demon Deacons’ tournament hopes. Pittsburgh, famously, beat North Carolina. Louisville beat Wake Forest. N.C. State beat Virginia Tech. That’s not like losing to an extremely mediocre neighborhood-of-.500 team like Florida State or Syracuse or Clemson was. It was inexcusable. And as with nonconference losses, you can stomach a couple of them, but not a bunch.

You can’t get seven – or eight, or nine – teams into the NCAA tournament if you can’t beat the worst teams in your own league. But you can carry a handful of bad teams if you take care of business against them.

So that’s emerging as the mandate for the ACC’s haves this season: Beat up on the have-nots. Because there’s enough good in the top third of the league to suggest the ACC’s going to be just fine. But there’s enough bad in the bottom third to leave no margin for error against those stragglers.

It is more than a little jarring to see all these losses piling up again. The ACC is certainly playing with the same fire. It still has a chance to avoid getting burned again.

Never miss a Luke DeCock column. Sign up at tinyurl.com/lukeslatest to have them delivered directly to your email inbox as soon as they post.

Luke DeCock’s Latest: Never miss a column on the Canes, ACC or other Triangle sports