GREENSBORO, N.C. -- Four weeks from today, on the second Sunday in March, they'll play the championship game of the ACC Tournament.

That's 28 days to sell tickets to an event that - once upon a pre-expansion time - was a guaranteed sellout. Tickets were split evenly among the member schools and snapped up by donors, alumni, boosters and season-ticket holders.

It was a different time.

Wednesday night during Raycom's broadcast of the Duke-North Carolina basketball game, there was a see-you-in-Atlanta commercial for the tournament - an advertising rarity in days gone by.

As of Saturday, five of the league's 12 schools - Duke, North Carolina, Clemson, Maryland and Virginia - were selling ticket books on their websites.

A sixth school - Florida State - promised ticket information "later this season."

It's still an expensive ticket, still sold in book form only with admission good for all 11 games of the tournament.

Clemson's website advertises lower-level books for $396 apiece. Carolina has only upper-level seats available for $297 per book.

Those prices are consistent, regardless of which school is selling. Make no mistake: It's the individual schools that are selling - not the arena, not the ACC - and the marketing strategies are up to them.

N.C. State, for instance, is not selling tickets through its gopack.com website.

State asked for - and received - an allotment of 1,200 tickets plus 300 to sell on consignment, said Chris Kingston, the Wolfpack's associate athletics director in charge of day-to-day operations for football and men's basketball.

"We've sold 1,245 so far to the Wolfpack Club and season-ticket holders," Kingston said, "and the rest are in the N.C. State block of seats. We can still push a few more books, and we were allocated some of the [luxury] suites."

Philips Arena, which opened in 1999, is a little bit smaller than the Greensboro Coliseum (23,381). It seats 18,729 for basketball games with 96 luxury suites and 2,893 club seats.

Under the old policy, the ACC would have given each school 1,560 tickets to sell. But the league learned a hard truth in Greensboro the past couple of years: Not all of its schools are created equal.

Empty seats in the Boston College and Miami sections stuck out, and ticket distribution needed to be tweaked for the farthest outposts of the expanded league. Consider:

Conte Forum in Chestnut Hill, Mass., is 1,102 highway miles from Philips Arena, more than an 18-hour drive away.

BankUnited Center in Coral Gables, Fla., is a 10 1/2-hour drive away.

Kingston said all the schools work closely with Karl Hicks, the ACC's associate commissioner for men's basketball operations, on ticket distribution. Simply put: Some schools need more than other schools.

"We all get different allotments. It's a sliding scale now, not an even split," Kingston said. "It's a fluid process working with Karl. We're in constant communication. It's about three times a week now, and it could be daily when we get closer to the date. If a school can't move tickets, we'll all work to adjust."

Kingston said the adjustments can be made so that a school's fans can still all be seated together.

"We can work with the other schools," he said, "and grow or shrink on the right or left."

The secondary market - that is, fans who buy from fans whose teams get eliminated - is also a concern this season.

Two years ago, Atlanta's hometown ACC team - Georgia Tech - played Duke in the tournament championship game in Greensboro. This year, the Yellow Jackets are the worst team in the conference: 9-15 overall, 2-8 in league play.

Will their casual fans come out? Probably not.

The Jackets have played their ACC home games this season at Philips Arena, with the building configured to seat 10,335. They haven't come close to filling it, averaging paid attendance of 4,655.

But the ACC is hopeful. Atlanta has a large alumni base from various ACC outposts - notably Florida State - and the two top-drawing tournaments in league history were played at the cavernous Georgia Dome.

The proof will show four weeks from now.