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A year from now, the ACC's spring business meetings will be heavy on the business. For now, there's still a little chance for spring.

As the league's coaches, athletics directors and faculty representatives congregate at Amelia Island, Fla., they're in an intermediate stage of the conference's life cycle. Expansion of the men's basketball schedule is off the table for now, the football television contract is in its early years, and there are no major financial fires to extinguish.

"This is going to be a very normal meeting," ACC commissioner John Swofford said last week. "I don't think there's any single agenda item that sticks out as particularly controversial or time-consuming. We'll just have to see how the discussions go and evolve."

In 2007, the league's coaches prevailed upon their superiors to veto an expansion of the league basketball schedule from 16 to 18 games. After the ACC received only four bids to the NCAA tournament this year for the second straight season, the topic became hot. Or so it seemed. Some coaches seemed willing to reconsider the idea, perhaps thinking that a tougher overall resumé might be an effective selling point to the NCAA tournament selection committee.

But for now, the issue is moot. When it expanded membership to 12 teams for 2005-06, the ACC agreed to a three-year scheduling rotation, an arrangement that must run its course in order to be as fair as possible to everybody. (The only perfectly equitable system, the round-robin, became implausible with growth from nine to 12 schools.)

Last year, the three-year rotation was renewed for 2008-09 and the two seasons thereafter, so it's too late to make an imminent change.

The basketball schedule setup runs concurrently with the league's television contract, scheduled to expire after the 2010-11 season. The two need to be in sync for the sake of expediency and value.

Next year, TV contract talks will get serious. It's customary for both sides to talk turkey with two years remaining on a deal. So the scheduling issue can work its way onto the docket then, but it's highly unlikely that any change would be seen until 2011-12, anyway.

When those TV discussions do percolate, don't expect the ACC to follow the Big Ten's model and create its own network.

"The Big 12 has renegotiated its TV contract since the Big Ten Network went into effect, and it chose not to go that route," Swofford said. "The SEC has begun its discussions for its next agreements. Time will tell. It's something we want to keep an eye on. People in the industry view the Big Ten Network as a wait-and-see proposition."

The conference doesn't expect any abnormalities when it receives its 2006-07 fiscal year tax return from the IRS. The league filed for an extension this year.

Results from the NCAA's academic progress ratings were almost universally good across the league. More than 82 percent of the ACC teams scored at or above the national averages for their sports. Duke (26 of 26) and Wake Forest (18 for 18) were perfect. Of Boston College's 15 women's sports, 12 scored 990 or above on the 1,000-point scale, which represents a four-year average of numbers measuring retention and eligibility of athletes.

Contact Rob Daniels at 373-7028 or rob.daniels @news-record.com