Miami and Florida State worked their way into the losers' bracket of the College World Series and one of the ACC teams is going home today.

The rivals play at 2 p.m. at Rosenblatt Stadium. It's not where the Canes, the No. 1 seed in the tournament, or Noles, who won 54 games, expected to be.

"I'm certainly surprised that both of us are playing an elimination game at the earliest possible time," FSU coach Mike Martin said in today's USA Today.

Miami won the regular-season series in Tallahassee. Stanford and Georgia play in the top half of the bracket at 7 p.m. today.

We're big on nonconference football games here and their meaning to the ACC. Matt Hayes, of The Sporting News, takes a closer look at the nonconference schedules for the ACC, SEC and Big East and ranks them.

Hayes ranks Miami's schedule the toughest in the ACC, no argument there, but he has Florida as the No. 1 schedule in the SEC because the Gators play Miami and Florida State. If it was 1994, maybe, but not in 2008.

CHAPEL HILL — It didn't take long Tuesday for North Carolina coach Mike Fox to be asked an all-too-familiar question: With UNC, Miami and Florida State all advancing to the College World Series, is this the year the ACC will finally win the national baseball championship?

"I don’t know. How many years has it been? Fifty-five?" he asked, laughing.

Wake Forest was the last team to win it, in 1955, a reporter reminded him.

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N.C. State fell short, and as the only road team that wasn't entirely unexpected, but the ACC will be well represented in the College World Series.

UNC, for the third straight year, Miami and Florida State will all make the trip to Omaha giving the ACC bragging rights for college baseball supremacy (again, fully acknowledging the fact that the conference hasn't produced a national champion since 1955).

The SEC and Pac-10 could have two CWS participants if LSU and Arizona State win tonight but no one can match the ACC's total. The ACC sent four teams to the CWS, baseball's Final Eight, in 2006.

The ACC placed three teams in the top eight overall seeds for the NCAA baseball tournament with Miami (No. 1), North Carolina (No. 2) and Florida State (No. 4) all earning top seeds.

The top seeds all will host four-team regionals as did eight at-large schools, like N.C. State.

The Wolfpack (38-20) will host James Madison (38-17) in the 7 p.m. game of the Raleigh regional while Charlotte and South Carolina will also meet at Doak Field.

The Tar Heels (46-12) will play Mt. St. Mary's (21-32) at 6 p.m. Friday in Cary, with Elon and UNC-Wilmington rounding out the regional.

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JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (AP) — Jemile Weeks hit a three-run homer and Enrique Garcia threw seven scoreless innings to lead top-seeded Miami into the ACC championship game with a 5-2 victory over N.C. State on Saturday.

The Hurricanes (46-8) will play Virginia at 1 p.m. Sunday. Miami swept the regular-season series from the Cavaliers 3-0 at home and have a four-game winning streak against them.

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Former Miami football player Kirby Freeman, now at Baylor, may be the first opposing quarterback that Wake Forest’s defense confronts in the 2008 season.

The 6-3, 210-pound Freeman, a graduate student and native of Brownwood, Texas, transferred to Baylor after the 2007 season. He’s immediately eligible under an NCAA rule that allows certain graduate students to avoid having to sit out the customary one season upon transferring.

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Kirby Hocutt is Miami's new athletic director, and as you can tell from the picture, he is the anti-Paul Dee.

The former Kansas State linebacker is ostensibly in charge of rebuilding Miami football. That's probably not the greatest news for second-year coach Randy Shannon, who was hired by Dee.

Hocutt, 36, worked for six years as an assistant athletic director at Oklahoma before getting the call from The U.

• How low can the ACC go?
• Boston College and Clemson
• Florida State and Maryland
• N.C. State and Wake Forest
• Va. Tech and UVa
• UNC and Duke

2007 record: 7-6, 4-4 ACC

Returning starters: Offense 4, Defense 4.

Quarterback?: No. Taylor Bennett (7 TDs, 9 INTs) transferred to Louisiana Tech.

Avoid in the ACC: N.C. State, Maryland, Wake Forest

Coaching situation: After winning seven games for the fifth time in six seasons, Chan Gailey got the boot. He was replaced by Navy's Paul Johnson. At Navy, Johnson turned one of the worst programs in the country into a consistent winner (45-29 in six seasons). Plan B in the coaching searches at both UNC and N.C. State in 2006, Johnson was Plan A for both Georgia Tech and Duke in 2007. He chose to return to the state of Georgia, where he coached I-AA power Georgia Southern for five seasons in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

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• Wake Forest and N.C. State
• Boston College and Clemson
• Florida State and Maryland
• Va. Tech and UVa
• Miami and Ga. Tech
• UNC and Duke

If you thought the ACC was bad last year, or the year before, or the year before ... brace yourself for 2008. The league could be even worse, if that's possible.

Attrition, either through the NFL Draft, graduation or suspensions, has hit the division champs, Boston College and Virginia Tech, hard.

Traditional powers Miami and Florida State, who went a combined 12-13 in 2007, are no longer reloading but out-and-out rebuilding. FSU is doing so with the handicap of an academic scandal.

The ACC, and Coastal Division in particular, is so bad that Duke could equal its combined win total since 2004 before October ends.

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When the ACC spring meetings begin Sunday at Amelia Island, Fla., discussions of expanded conference scheduling will not be limited to basketball.

Also under review will be the possibility of going to a nine-game league format in football. Under the current system, ACC teams play eight conference games. Each school in the two six-team divisions — Atlantic and Coastal — play the other five division members plus three from the opposite division.

Should a nine-game format be adopted, each team would play four games against teams from the opposite division.

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Thursday, Aug. 28
Jacksonville State @ Ga. Tech
Charleston Southern @ Miami
N.C. State @ South Carolina
Wake Forest @ Baylor

Saturday, Aug. 30
Boston College vs. Kent State (@ Cleveland)
Alabama vs. Clemson (@ Atlanta)
James Madison @ Duke
Delaware @ Maryland
McNeese State @ UNC
USC @ UVa
Va. Tech vs. East Carolina (@ Charlotte)

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North Carolina will play Michigan State at Detroit's Ford Field and Duke will play at Purdue in next season's ACC/Big Ten Challenge.

As expected, N.C. State will be left out of the made-for-TV event for the first time because it finished last in league play. The Big Ten features 11 teams; the ACC has a dozen.

The schedule:

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CORAL GABLES, Fla. (AP) — Miami Hurricanes basketball coach Frank Haith signed a five-year contract through the 2012-13 season, a reward for leading the school to 23 wins and its first berth in the NCAA tournament since 2002.

In Haith's fourth season, the Hurricanes went 23-11 and earned only the fourth NCAA tournament victory in school history before losing in the second round to Texas.

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UNC's the last ACC team standing.

The Pac-10 and Big East lead the Sweet 16 participants with three each. The Big East went an impressive 7-1 in the first round but 3-4 in the second.

The conference breakdown (through two rounds):

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