Gearing up for the NCAA Tournament...

We'll find out how many ACC teams will be in the field. If my math is correct, all the team from the Big 12, the Big 10, the SEC, and I believe the Big East, they're all going to be in. And the ACC is going to be in the first four. Just one team in the first four. I have no idea.

It does seem like the league is trending towards five, maybe six. Find out with Gary Parrish, CBS Sports has to say. He does a radio show in Memphis. He does the Top 25 in one. He is a great dude.

And he's on TV a lot. I appreciate your time, man. How are you? I am doing well. Getting ready to head back home for like 48 hours and then back to New York City.

I live here in the big city more than I live in my actual home these days. But life's good, man. You've been all right? I've been very good. So I am a fan of the Ion College Basketball Podcast.

You know this. I've said this every time you come on. This is the setting. This is the setting I get when I see you and Matt Norlander, who apparently never leaves his attic.

This is the setting I see when I watch you on TV. So how are you looking at the ACC? Are you in in line with the Jerry Palms of the world who see a downtrodden league where history does not matter?

Yes. I mean, that's the simplest way to answer it. I mean, the league's not good. I mean, it's not rating as well as most other power conferences. They have zero teams in the Top 30 at Kim Palm right now. The fact that Pitt is tied for first, and not a bubble team, but closer to the bubble than any ACC first place team should ever be at this point in the season, speaks to where the league is in this particular season.

And it's honestly not hard to understand how it got to this place. North Carolina has struggled wildly relative to preseason expectations and normal historical standards. Duke is down relative to normal historical standards. Louisville is embarrassingly bad relative to normal historical standards. Notre Dame down. Florida State down. Syracuse looking nothing like the Syracuse program that I grew up with. When you, and this is true with any league in the country, when your big brands that have been reliable for years, if not decades, when they, if not all, but lots of them start to struggle at the same time, that's how you end up with Miami and Pitt tied for first in the league and a league that just doesn't rate very well. Well, I happen to think Miami and Virginia are two very good teams. I don't know how they're not in the Top 30. And I, well, this is my, I'm not a math major.

Gary Parrish is with us here on the Adam Goldschule. I'm not a math major, but I think that there has to be some negative drag on the league when you have five historically bad teams in the rankings. Not historically bad teams, although they are bad, but the ACC has never had this many teams ranked in the bottom half of the entire sport. There are five teams that are ranked worse than 180, including Louisville.

That's over 300. And that has to have a negative drag on the rest of the league. Therefore they're getting no good wins. It's hard for me to believe that basically every game in the Big 12 is a quad one opportunity. And if you're on a home court in the ACC, you've got like two quad ones at best, probably not, and maybe one quad two, and then everything else is a quad three.

That just doesn't compute for me. It's a problem for the league. And listen, all of these computers, none of them are perfect, right? And especially the net and the quadrant system. Because my biggest complaint about the net, which let me be clear is better than any other computer system we've ever used to select teams and seed and seed teams for the NCAA tournament. But my big problem with the net is that we talk so much, and I'm guilty of this myself, about quadrant one wins and quadrant two wins and quadrant three losses. And very few people take the time to like dive into quadrant one and say, okay, this team has six quadrant one wins, but what are they?

Because right now, let's just say if you're NC State to throw a random team out there, you're NC State. If you play Houston at home and beat them, that is a quadrant one win. It's Houston's ranked number one in just about every computer. That's a big win undeniably.

This is also true. If you're NC State and you play at Drake and you win, that is a quadrant one win. Now you and I and everybody else understands that beating Houston is not the same as beating Drake or Central Florida or Kent State or Sam Houston State. But if you beat Houston at home and Sam Houston State on the road, those both fall in quadrant one.

And so I think it's very important for not only the selection committee, but fans to dive in there and see, okay, six quadrant one wins, three quadrant one wins, whatever the number is, but what are they? Are they just road wins over mediocre teams or are they actually good wins? Because sometimes some people, some teams rather, they stack quad one wins and they're really, for the most part, just road wins over teams that aren't even going to make the NCAA tournament.

So I mean, I can make it even more realistic if I'm not mistaken. If NC State were to host Utah State and beat them, that's a quad one win. But if they were to host at this point, we'll just say North Carolina, that's not. And I have a hard time believing that the former is a better win than the latter. But that could just be historical bias.

Gary Parrish is joining us here on the Adam Gold show. All right. And getting away from all the numbers and all of that stuff, what do you think the ceiling is? And you brought up states. Let's start with state. What do you think the ceiling is for NC State? Well, listen, you've got an NBA player and Terquavion Smith. You've got a team that has done enough to, I think, feel like it's safely in the NCAA tournament right now.

And the truth is, this is, you know, I understand the question. And I guess if I were answering it just on a very surface level, I'd say, you know, obviously the floor is losing the first round of the NCAA tournament and the ceiling, let's say, is a sweet 16 appearance. But the truth is, we never know how this bracket is going to unfold. You could find yourself in the sweet 16 playing. I'm just throwing numbers out.

You'll get the point. An 11 seed to get to the elite eight and then playing a six seed to get to the final four. On selection Sunday, that bracket always comes out and immediately people like me sit down with the bracket and we go, oh man, look at Kansas's path.

That's a really tough path. And then all it takes is an upset here, upset there. And now Kansas has the easiest path. So I try to not speak in absolutes about what's the ceiling because the path could create a situation where, okay, I didn't think you were really much better than a sweet 16 team, but you're favored to win your sweet 16 game. And if you win your sweet 16 game, you're favored to win your elite eight game if you're playing a certain opponent. But broadly speaking, I think NC State looks like a could, if things, you know, bounce the right way, end up in the sweet 16, but it's hard to envision anything past that unless, of course, the bracket just opens up.

Right. I happen to love their backcourt. And I know we're having this conversation here on Tobacco Road about who's the ACC Player of the Year.

I know I've heard a lot of people say Turquavian Smith. I think Jarkel Joyner has been their best player. And Joyner, the transfer from from Ole Miss has been dynamite. He's been more consistent, more efficient, and he's essentially handled the ball. He's become the point guard. He single handedly kept him in against Duke.

D.J. Burns has been great and fun, but I think Jarkel Joyner has been their best team. So Carolina started the season number one. They are, by most accounts, on the outside looking in to the NCAA tournament. I kind of think they'll be fine. But regardless, maybe I'm just an optimist. I mean, somewhere in there is a I don't think it's a Final Four team by any stretch of the imagination. I think last year had a lot to do with Brady Manick and luck and just an absolute scorching hot streak. But I think there's a good team somewhere in there.

What do you see from them? I've always thought there's a good team somewhere in there, but I mean, it's March 2nd and we haven't really seen it yet. I mean, at some point we got to and I hold myself to this as well. The go to line all season and certainly all offseason was they returned four starters from a team that played for the national championship, beat Duke twice down the stretch, and they're replacing Brady Manick with Pete Nance. And that's a similar player. And boy, they could really win a national championship. Well, what we found out is that Pete Nance is not Brady Manick in really any way whatsoever.

We probably underestimated exactly what Brady Manick meant to that team. And then the other stuff just hasn't clicked. And I don't know if it's chemistry problems, locker room problems, if it's too many guys with too many agendas, like that would be difficult for me to say from here. But clearly something just hasn't been right all season long.

I mean, you don't find yourself as recently as last weekend still looking to add your first quadrant one win if things have gone well. So I would never rule out Carolina, of course, making the NCAA tournament and then once they're there winning games in the NCAA tournament. But I'm more out on them now than I probably have been most of the season, despite the fact that they're, you know, they have won three in a row. And that's because, you know, like Virginia is good.

I agree with you, but flawed, very flawed. And the Notre Dame's bad. Florida State's bad. I don't know what the three game winning streak means exactly. I think obviously this weekend is massive, not just because it's a rivalry game, but because, you know, if you want to get on the right side of the bubble, you got to win some more games like this. And I think if they don't win Saturday, they've got significant work to do in the ACC tournament. But yeah, I'm just sort of like this team on paper looked like a contender, but on the court, literally at no point this season has it ever appeared that way. Yeah, I think they can be a sweet 16 team as well. And I think that's basically it for them.

And I know we're going to let you go here in about 90 seconds or less. But this is this is a good opportunity for North Carolina to get another quad to win because if they beat Duke, Duke will probably fall out of the top 30 in the net. And that's well how we'll be discussing this as a quad to win. Do you think they'll ever change the system in how we at least talk about this? I do think they will change it because like, listen, I understand you're sort of start, you're not starting from scratch, but you're starting with something new. And then I think you can reasonably look at it just like you would any other sort of algorithm and adjust to make it more sensible. In the ways that you think it needs to be adjusted. Ken Pomeroy, who probably has the most famous college basketball algorithm, he adjusted the like, the algorithm he uses today is not the algorithm he used it in 2002.

He has adjusted time and time again, where he sees things that appear to him to be flaws. And like I said earlier, there's clearly flaws with if not the net, certainly the quadrant system. Again, you know, winning at Sam Houston State should not be the same thing as beating Kansas.

Like, but that's what it is. If Kansas comes to Cameron Indoor and you beat them, that's a quadrant one, obviously. But if Duke then goes to Sam Houston State and wins, that's also a quadrant one win. You've got to, I don't know if it's tighten up the quadrants, create more quadrants. But those two things that I just described should not be the same thing or and I know they're not the same thing, but they shouldn't fall in the same category. I just think right now they do.

I'm waiting for a conversation about a quadrant eight win because that's what we're probably headed for. Gary Parrish, Eye on College Basketball podcast. Go check it out.

He and Matt are great. Shouts to you, Leaky Black, Camel Fighting and our friend Nada, who we talked to a lot. Thank you very much. I appreciate it, buddy. Good to see you. You got it. Gary Parrish here on The Adam Gold Show.