What's happened to ACC men's basketball?
The storied conference is struggling for a second-straight year and is statistically the worst of college basketball's six major leagues. How did it get here?
Four years ago, the ACC was in a familiar and enviable position.
The conference accounted for four of the top 10 men’s basketball teams in the final Associated Press poll and by the time the NCAA Tournament bracket was revealed, three of the four No. 1 seeds were from the storied conference.
With its star-studded freshman class, Duke was appointment viewing every time it took the court, capturing the kind of national attention few, if any, college teams had in decades. At 27-6 entering the tournament, North Carolina gave Roy Williams the final elite team of his legendary career. One year after suffering the ignominy of being the first No. 1 seed to lose to a No. 16 seed, Virginia pieced together a storybook comeback by earning the first national title in program history. That on-court success was further validated two months later, when six of the first 11 picks in the NBA Draft came from the ACC.
In 2023, the situation isn’t nearly as rosy.
As the league’s 15 teams gather in its traditional home of Greensboro, N.C. this week for the ACC Tournament, a conference featuring four of the 10 winningest programs in college basketball history and eight of the past 21 national champions is yet again facing what were once unthinkable questions and critiques.
Entering the tournament, the ACC had no teams ranked in the KenPom top 30, giving it fewer representatives than the West Coast Conference, Mountain West Conference and Conference USA. Things were only so much better in the NCAA’s NET rankings, with only Duke, at No. 24, in the top 25. KenPom, a Bible for college basketball diehards, rates the ACC not only as the worst of the six major conferences, but comfortably behind the Mountain West, as well. One year after getting five teams in the NCAA Tournament – its fewest since 2013, when the league had three fewer members – ESPN’s mock bracket Thursday night had just five ACC squads in the 68-team field. Over the past two years, its programs have gone 42-62 in regular season non-conference play against teams from the other major conferences.
That slew of statistics has put the conference on the defensive, with its coaches having to answer questions about the league’s shortcomings after years of going out of their way to tout the league as college basketball’s best.
“I’m frustrated with the narrative of the league,” Clemson coach Brad Brownell said last month. “I get it a little bit. But I think that the 8-9-10 teams at the top of our league that are playing very well can all play with the best teams in just about any league.”
From the faces most closely tied to the conference as anyone, the explanations vary. Some say that the league is much tougher and deeper than many give it credit for. Others point their finger at what they see as flawed analytical models. Pitt coach Jeff Capel turned his gaze to the ACC Network, believing a channel built to bolster the image of the league isn’t quite enough of a propaganda arm.
“When we were at Virginia Tech, the night before, I’m watching our own network and one of the first questions that comes up is ‘Is it perception or reality that the ACC is down?’” Capel said last month. “I never see that on the Big Ten Network. I watch the Big Ten Network a lot because one of my best friends coaches in that league, so I’m watching them. They’re always, always pumping the Big Ten. Always. I think it’s a really good league, but I think our’s is, too. I wish that the people who represent us would have the respect, pump our league and be positive instead of looking at negative things.”
The ACC is no longer shielded by the history and lore that defined it for so many years. While it may not be quite as underwhelming as various numbers indicate, it’s a far cry from what it was as recently as a handful of years ago.
“This is an abnormality,” ESPN analyst Seth Greenberg, who coached in the ACC for eight seasons at Virginia Tech, told me last year. “You had some things that were out of the ordinary for sure for this conference. But it can’t happen two years in a row.”
Yet it has. So how did we get to this point?
A coaching brain drain
Most generously, the ACC could be described as a league in transition. A conference synonymous with the same wildly successful faces for years is acclimating to life without them.
In back-to-back years, Williams and Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski retired, thrusting the ACC’s two most tradition-rich programs into relative uncertainty under new leaders, Hubert Davis and Jon Scheyer, both of whom are first-time head coaches. The early returns have been a slight drop-off from what the programs had been, as the pair entered the tournament with a combined record of 71-30, a win percentage of 0.703 (over the course of their careers at North Carolina and Duke, Williams and Krzyzewski went 1,614-472, a win percentage of 0.774, with eight national championships and 18 Final Fours between them).
While their relative inexperience made them risky hires, despite their deep ties to the programs, Davis and Scheyer will spend their tenures fighting an uphill battle. Traditionally, coaches who follow legends fail to reach the lofty standard set by their predecessor. Of the 23 men who replaced a national-championship-winning coach since the NCAA Tournament field expanded to 64 teams in 1985, only eight went on to win at least two-thirds of their games at the school. Additionally, just eight made at least one Final Four and only three won a national championship themselves.
Even beyond that immense shadow, ACC programs have simply struggled with identifying, hiring and nurturing the right coaches.
In the 10 hiring cycles between 2012 and 2021, 13 different coaches were brought in to lead ACC teams. Of those 13 hires, only two have won at least 60% of their games at the school. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy in some ways – disadvantaged programs who typically finish near the bottom of the conference are more likely to cycle through coaches – but Duke, North Carolina, Louisville and North Carolina State, all of which have multiple national championships to their name, are among the schools that have made hires during that stretch.
Its top programs are struggling
For years, the ACC prided itself on the historical powers it had amassed. Now, many of those same programs are languishing.
North Carolina is 71-47 over the past four regular seasons after going 99-26 in the previous four. After a shocking run to the national championship game as a No. 8 seed last season obscured an underwhelming first regular season under Davis, the Tar Heels have been the biggest disappointment in college basketball this season, with a 20-13 record following a nine-point loss Thursday against Virginia in the ACC Tournament quarterfinals. Barring a Selection Sunday stunner, they’ll become the first preseason No. 1 team to miss the NCAA Tournament.
Louisville, a proud program with three national championships and 10 Final Fours, just capped off the worst season in school history, with a 4-28 record under first-year head coach Kenny Payne. The four wins were its fewest since the 1940-41 season and the 28 losses in a single season were as many as it had suffered in the four seasons between 2012-16 combined. While 2022-23 represented a new, unfathomable low, the Cardinals had been trending downward since firing Rick Pitino in 2017. This year, it will miss the NCAA Tournament for the fourth time in the past five years after missing just two of 15 tournaments from 2003-17, one of which was the result of a self-imposed postseason ban. It has only one NCAA Tournament victory in the past eight years after winning 21 in the eight years before that.
“For the league, that’s got to get fixed,” David Teel, a hall-of-fame journalist for the Richmond Times-Dispatch who has covered the ACC for 40 years, told me. “It needs to happen fairly quickly. You look around the country and it can be done fairly quickly if you have some good fortune and exercise some good judgment with the portal.”
Syracuse, the sixth-winningest program in college basketball history, has gone 172-126 (0.578 win percentage) the past nine seasons. In the nine seasons before that, it went 245-79 (0.756). Over those nine most recent years, it hasn’t been ranked in the final AP poll and had not earned better than a No. 8 seed in the NCAA Tournament. It had been among the 25 teams in the final AP poll 26 times in 31 seasons from 1984-2014. Following the Orange’s loss to Wake Forest Wednesday in the ACC Tournament, the university announced that 47th-year head coach Jim Boeheim would not be returning.
Though not bluebloods, Notre Dame and Florida State are two consistently successful programs that have fallen on hard times. The Fighting Irish finished 3-17 in conference play this season and will miss the NCAA Tournament for the fifth time in the past six years after making the field in nine of the previous 11 tournaments before that. The Seminoles have gone 26-37 the past two seasons, including a 9-23 finish in 2022-23, which marked its fewest wins since the 2000-01 season. In five seasons from 2016-21, they went 122-41.
The four schools the ACC raided from the Big East in an attempt to create a basketball behemoth have largely struggled of late. Since the start of the 2017-18 season, Pitt, Syracuse, Notre Dame and Louisville have gone a combined 390-385.
Even Duke, a relative success story among that group, is 21st in the most recent AP poll, putting it in danger of its third-lowest lowest final ranking since 1997.
Because of these simultaneous developments, the ACC is at least partially a victim of perception. In addition to Virginia and Duke, the teams hovering near the top of the conference standings for much of the season were Clemson, a football school with only two NCAA Tournament appearances the past 11 years; Pitt, which went 75-110 the previous six seasons before at last emerging from the conference’s basement this season; and Miami, a reliable winner under coach Jim Larrañaga, but a program that only came back into existence in 1985. Without many of the customary headliners vying for a regular-season conference title, the league’s larger national profile undoubtedly suffered.
Its bottom tier is historically bad
Even more than the lack of luster at the top, the ACC has been hampered this season by its bottom.
Exactly one-third of the conference’s 15 teams are ranked outside the top 150 on KenPom, including two teams, Florida State and Louisville, that aren’t even in the top 200. At No. 293, the Cardinals are behind the likes of South Dakota, Cal Poly and Cal State Bakersfield.
While every major conference has its cellar-dwellers, the ACC has never had this many that have been this bad. From 2002-22, going back to the first year of the rankings, the ACC had a total of 15 teams finish outside the KenPom top 150, an average of only 0.7 per year. In that time, it never had more than three sub-150 teams and in 19 of those 21 years, that number was one or zero.
“That’s what has really killed the league,” Teel said.
There’s a relative lack of elite talent
For all of the league’s most revered coaches accomplished over the course of their respective careers, much of that work rested on the shoulders of excellent players. By most measurements, that, too, has changed for the worse in recent years.
In each of the past two NBA Drafts, the ACC has had only seven players selected, the lowest marks since the conference took on its current membership structure in 2014. It might dip even more this year, as an ESPN mock draft from February featured only five ACC players. Over the past three years, the league has had 22 NBA Draft picks, including 13 first-rounders. In the three years before that, it had 37 draft selections and 26 first-rounders.
A player’s NBA prospects don’t always correlate with how effective they were as a college player and how much their teams won, but it offers at least an indication of a dwindling talent pool the past several years.
The recruiting efforts of many of the conference’s programs reinforce that idea. ACC schools claimed 16 of 247 Sports’ top 100 recruits in 2021, the lowest it had been since the conference took on its current form in 2014. After rebounding with 21 in 2022, they have just 16 in the 2023 class, though that number can improve as some of those prospects have yet to make a college choice.
In both 2020 and 2021, only two ACC programs were among the top 15 finishers in 247’s team recruiting rankings. Right now, only Duke has a top-20 class for 2023, with Pitt the next-closest conference mate, at No. 24.
Other conference have caught up to it – or surpassed it
While the ACC has declined over the past few years, other leagues have surged or, at the very least, remained steady.
The Big 12 has had each of the past two national champions and has finished as the No. 1 conference on KenPom eight of the past 10 seasons. Next season, it will add the country’s current No. 1 team, Houston, as well as traditionally strong programs in Cincinnati and BYU. For its general lack of postseason achievements – one of its programs hasn’t won a national title since Michigan State in 2000 – the Big Ten has been responsible for 26 NCAA Tournament bids the past three years. The ACC, by comparison, has 19, the same number as the Big 12, which has five fewer members.
But it’s the rise of another conference, the SEC, that has been particularly glaring when compared with the ACC. Once dismissed as a basketball afterthought, the SEC has become a viable national force in the sport. Boosted by its vast resources – 10 of the top 25 Power Five schools in revenue during the 2019-20 academic year were from the conference – the SEC has increasingly set aside money to improve its hardwood fortunes. From 2014-15 to 2019-20, the men’s basketball budgets of seven of the SEC’s 14 members increased by at least 40%, according to Department of Education data.
Those off-court commitments have produced on-court results. It has six teams in the KenPom top 30 this season, second only to the Big 12. Over the past three years, it has produced 32 NBA Draft picks, 18 of whom were first-rounders. The ACC, by comparison, had 22 and 13, respectively, during that same stretch.
Given that there’s a sizable overlap in their geographic footprints, the SEC’s improvement has come partially at the expense of the ACC.
But can it get better?
Grim as the larger picture may seem at the moment for the ACC, there’s good reason to believe this malaise is only temporary.
For all that has transpired over the past two seasons, the league is still home to three of the nine programs with the most Final Fours and four of the 15 programs with at least two national championships. Those achievements aren’t just relics of the past. Four of the top 16 major-conference schools in men’s basketball spending during the most recent fiscal year were from the ACC. Only the Big 12, with five, has more. This is still a conference where basketball not only matters, but is a fundamental part of the schools’ identities. When a sport is that important to a university, subpar results are only tolerated for so long.
Several of its programs have inherent advantages that many schools could only dream of, making them places where it takes a concerted effort not to win. If Davis, Scheyer and Payne are unable to build championship-caliber programs at North Carolina, Duke and Louisville, respectively, it will likely only take those administrations so long to find someone who can.
Success isn’t guaranteed elsewhere, however.
Jarring as Krzyzewski, Williams and Boeheim’s departures are, there are likely more to follow. Notre Dame is already working to replace Mike Brey, the program’s career leader in wins, who announced in January that he would step down at the end of the 2022-23 season. At Syracuse, Adrian Autry will replace Boeheim, the second-winningest coach in Division I men’s basketball history. Florida State’s Leonard Hamilton (74 years old) and Larrañaga (73) are both nearing the end of their respective careers after building sustained winners at programs that struggled in the 10 years before their arrivals. What will those programs look like without those men carefully guiding them?
In the meantime, there’s hope.
It’s quite possible that the ACC repeats what it did last season, when it was the subject of obituaries for so much of the season before sending three schools to the Elite Eight and two to the Final Four. Georgia Tech coach Josh Pastner was mocked, including by yours truly, for saying in Jan. 2022 that a middling North Carolina team was good enough to win the national championship. Fewer than three months later, the Tar Heels came within three points of doing just that.
This year, it’s not difficult to envision a talent-laden Duke team that has won 10 of its past 12 games or a veteran Miami team that has won nine of its past 10 make deep tournament runs. While a three-week, single-elimination tournament doesn’t negate the months of results and data that preceded it, another strong showing from the league could at least quell some of the more fatalistic, hyperbolic language.
But until that happens – if it even does – the same questions with the same unflattering answers will remain.
(Photo: Getty Image)