The league had an awful Tuesday.
The ACC had had itself a bad non-conference season heading into the ACC/SEC Challenge, and then came Tuesday night, where an embarrassment of carnage was on display. The SEC won nine of 10 games, seven of them by double-digits. The ACC is 2-21 against SEC teams on the season, which my sources indicate is not real good.
The league already is in deep trouble in terms of its NCAA tournament prospects, with yesterday’s resounding failure—no doubt the worst single-day performance in a quarter century of conference challenges—placing the depth of the problem in stark relief.
Nine ACC teams are outside the early-season NET top 100, while just four are in the top 50. The Pomeroy Ratings (which have preseason data informing it) paint a picture almost as bleak, with four teams in the top 50 and six outside the top 100.
NC State is one of the teams outside the NET top 100, putting it in a very bad spot ahead of a league slate that plainly is not going to provide a lot of quality win opportunities. The Wolfpack’s rough excursion to San Diego looks far more costly than a result in November has any right to be, given the league context in which it is operating. It’s just all bad news.
So State’s game against Texas Wednesday night is something of a must-win, assuming of course that this Wolfpack team doesn’t prove capable of winning at Kansas. That’s an odd way to think about a non-conference game in the first week of December, but here we are.