Tell me if you've heard this one before?

A 12-team league with a lot of mediocrity and little dead weight earns four NCAA men's basketball tournament berths. Coaches soon complain about how a league that is ranked at or near the top in every statistical measure got jobbed. Coaches then promise to do a better job of promoting the conference the next year.

That was the ACC in 2006. And it's the ACC in 2008.

Must be an election year --- ACC coaches are beating the drum again.

And here's the thing --- it's pretty silly.

For years, any intelligent fan has known that teams earn NCAA bids, not leagues. The conference rankings are meaningless and say little about the elite programs; rather, league RPI does a good job of identifying which conference's bad teams are less bad than other conferences.

(Quick aside: Conference affiliation did once mean something in the NCAA's bracketing procedures. According to the 2008 NCAA Men's Final Four Records Book, this change was made in 1978 before more progressive seeding measures were taken in the early 1980s:

"A seeding process was used for the first time for individual teams. A maximum of four automatic-qualifying conference teams were seeded in each of the four regional brackets. These teams were seeded based on their respective conferences' won-lost percentages during the past five years.")

The ACC generally has the market cornered on avoiding truly wretched teams. No ACC team has finished with less than 10 wins since 2002, when a team that wore North Carolina's jerseys but looked nothing like any Carolina team of the last 40 years went 8-20.

The Big 12 has had four such teams that played full seasons in the last six seasons (2004 Baylor, 2004 Texas A&M, 2005 Baylor and 2007 Colorado). The Big East had three (2004 St. John's, 2005 St. John's and 2006 South Florida).

The Big Ten had seven (2003 Penn State, 2004 Penn State, 2005 Penn State, 2005 Purdue, 2006 Purdue, 2007 Minnesota and 2008 Northwestern). The Pac-10 had three (2003 Washington State, 2007 Arizona State and 2008 Oregon State). The SEC had two (2003 Arkansas and 2005 Georgia).

But is the argument that there is no Oregon State, no Northwestern or no South Florida to beat up on really the grounds for such squabbling? Not really.

Although Virginia Tech sure looked like a tournament-caliber team by the end of last season, it didn't need to go lose to Old Dominion and Richmond and fail to beat a tournament-bound team until March 14.

Passing the eyeball test is nice, but you need to actually build a resume beyond going 9-7 in conference while playing an unbalanced league schedule. Virginia Tech didn't play North Carolina, Duke, Clemson or Miami --- the ACC's four NCAA teams --- twice in the regular season, which just goes to show not all 9-7s are built the same. The Hokies, it should be noted, went 1-7 against teams that ultimately received NCAA invites.

Pretty much any other recent snub of note provided ample ammunition on its own to justify a postseason exclusion.

If Clemson wanted to reach the tournament in 2007, it shouldn't have gone 4-10 to finish the regular season.

If Florida State wanted to reach the tournament in 2007, it shouldn't have lost five games in a row in February. (This is probably the most deserving team on this list; the committee probably should have considered the effect of point guard Toney Douglas' injury during that costly stretch, especially since he returned for the ACC tournament).

If Florida State wanted to reach the tournament in 2006, it shouldn't have waited until March to beat a tournament-bound team and probably should have played something a bit better than the nation's 316th-ranked nonconference schedule (2008 Arizona State can commiserate on the latter trait).

If Maryland wanted to reach the tournament in 2006, well, it probably should have beaten someone of substance at some point after it took its final exams for the 2005 fall semester --- and certainly after it lost its leading scorer at the start of the next semester.

It's not about promotion, or chest-beating, or getting Digger Phelps to place a team in his amorphous field of 87 (Warning: Size of Phelps' tournament field subject to change by the day).

It's not about a commissioner grand-standing for the cameras or the dozens of mock brackets scattered all over Al Gore's Invention, it's not about whether another league is better top to bottom and it's not even that much about most of the numbers a computer in Indianapolis spits out.

It's about being one of the 34 best at-large teams. ACC coaches will have to come to that conclusion eventually.

After all, no team has ever talked their way into the NCAA tournament.

--- Patrick Stevens