Merry Mayhem

Upsetting acts in the A. C. C.

Anywhere but the Atlantic Coast Conference, the game would have been dismissed as a mismatch: Duke, sixth-ranked basketball team in the nation and tied for the conference lead, vs. Clemson, wallowing near the bottom of the A.C.C. standings. Well, it was a mismatch --Clemson beat Duke last week by 21 points. Up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina clucked knowingly. A couple of weeks before, the Tarheels had taken their No. 2 national ranking to Clemson's Littlejohn Coliseum and been ambushed.

In the howling arenas of the A.C.C., where the fans are rabid and the play is hard, the word upset has lost its meaning. Probably no other conference has so many good teams, year in and year out, and about the only sure things are games between the A.C.C. and outside teams. This year, the A.C.C. is 75-15 against nonconference foes, a .833 winning percentage, which is better than that of any other major conference. Just ask Notre Dame how tough the A.C.C. is. First the No. 1 Irish lost to Maryland, then they beat North Carolina State by only a point and State was last in the league. This year, A.C.C. teams are 8 and 5 against the non-A.C.C. teams ranked in U.P.I.'s Top 20 last week.

The A.C.C. mayhem is scheduled to end this week with the annual tournament to decide the conference's automatic representative in the N.C.A.A. championships. The fans are already atremble with anticipation, scalpers are busy preparing hefty markups, to $225 or more a ticket, and the teams are mulling over old grudges. Predictably, the team that went into the tourney with the best record has wound up losing the event ten times in its 25-year run. The pain of defeat is not as great as it once was, however, since the N.C.A.A. recently has been inviting two A.C.C. teams.

North Carolina State won the N.C.A.A. title in 1974, but A.C.C. partisans were sorely disappointed by the second-place finishes of Duke last year and North Carolina in 1977. Any A.C.C. fan will tell you that if their teams did not get so exhausted beating the competition back home, they would conquer the country every year. Just ask anyone between Maryland and South Carolina. -

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