The real challenge that began Monday night, it seems, is for the Big Ten to finally beat the Atlantic Coast Conference in their annual challenge.On the other hand, says one of the three coaches who have been around for the entire history of the ACC/Big Ten Challenge, winning these face-to-face showdowns so early in the season might not carry that much weight in the long run.
"The thing I think people should remember,'' Maryland's Gary Williams said Monday, the day the 11th edition of the challenge officially began, "is it is the first week in December. I don't think these games have a tremendous effect on what takes place in February and March. There have been years where we've dominated, and yet the Big Ten has had more teams in the NCAA tournament. I think it depends on what you do from here on out after this game.''
Still, it is a source of pride for Maryland and its conference brethren that the ACC is 10-for-10 against the Big Ten, going 62-35 overall, and it is something they can take solace in even in leaner years -- when, as in the case Williams made reference in 2006, the Big Ten got six NCAA bids to the ACC's four, the second lowest total ever for that storied league since the field expanded to 64. That year, the ACC won the challenge, 6-5, but none of their teams made it past the round of 16.
Last season, the ACC got the Challenge win, 6-5, and the national championship, with North Carolina. In fact, the marquee matchup of this year's Challenge, on Tuesday night in Chapel Hill, pits the Tar Heels against the team it beat in the final last April, none other than Michigan State.
Late-autumn bragging rights aside, this series, spread over three days this year, does the job it was intended to do: produce compelling matchups. In more than a quarter of the 97 alltime games going into Monday night, 24 of 97, both teams were ranked at the time of their meeting. and 52 times at least one was ranked.
This year? The numbers, out of 11 games (Georgia Tech is the odd ACC team out), are five with at least one ranked team, and two with both. The aforementioned game Tuesday finds Michigan State ranked ninth and North Carolina 10th; on Wednesday, No. 15 Ohio State hosts No. 21 Florida State.
Elsewhere, fourth-ranked Purdue hosts Wake Forest Tuesday, while sixth-ranked Duke plays at Wisconsin Wednesday and No. 18 Clemson hosts Illinois. Four other teams playing in the challenge fell out of the rankings this week with losses in loaded holiday tournaments -- Maryland (which plays at Indiana Tuesday), Michigan (hosting Boston College Wednesday), Minnesota (at Miami Wednesday) and Illinois.
Ranked or not, the overwhelming majority of teams have something important on the line in these games, and even if the actual results are forgotten by the time they're all deep into their own conference's schedules, what happens this week will have a carryover. Wisconsin's Bo Ryan, for instance, sees a window for his 6-1 team -- which beat Arizona and Maryland to finish third in the Maui Invitational -- to change the tone of the conversation around it by beating a team like Duke.
"There are teams that have earned the right to be a powerhouse, and Duke has earned that right on the court with what they've done,'' Ryan told reporters Monday. "But I think our players have earned the right to have some things said about them too.''
Tuesday's North Carolina-Michigan State game will be the third in the series to serve as a rematch of the national championship game: in the first two, the team that won the title (Maryland in 2002, North Carolina in '05) lost the return game (Indiana, Illinois). It's just more of an indication of how potentially prestigious -- and, thus, attractive to television -- the challenge is every year. Yet it has always ended up tilted in the ACC's favor, and if there is no clear explanation why the Big Ten keeps falling short, and no sure link between success in this and success in March, the results do speak for themselves.
The ACC dominates its home games, going 40-8 overall. Duke is 10-0 in the challenge, winning at home, on the road, on neutral courts, during its years of consistently reaching Final Fours and then when it began falling short. In a five-year span from 2003-07, the ACC went 36-15, even though the Big Ten had powerhouses at Illinois, Michigan State and Ohio State during that run while the ACC was struggling through its football-expansion malaise.
Besides Williams at Maryland, Duke's Mike Krzyzewski and Michigan State's Tom Izzo have been at their schools the entirety of the challenge; Ryan will coach Wisconsin in it for the ninth time.
Thanks to the rugged early schedules, only four teams -- three in the ACC, one in the Big Ten, and obviously not including the two '09 national finalists meeting Tuesday -- are undefeated. The Big East, still rolling as the season's first month closes, has more than that by itself.
Yet, as if to validate Williams' point, the two conferences that have produced the most Final Four teams in the decade now ending -- a time frame that spans the history of the challenge -- are the ACC, with nine, and the Big Ten, with eight.
