CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — It wasn’t that long ago that the Atlantic Coast Conference was flirting with its public goal of earning 10 bids to the NCAA Tournament to go with all those regular Final Four appearances.
Things have gotten tricky since for a league that proclaims itself as college basketball’s best.
The Final Four trips, even titles in the past decade, keep coming. So too do March Madness wins, more so than any league and not just from one or two teams carrying the load for deadweight members.
Yet the league is also getting its lowest bid totals since expanding beyond 12 teams. That conundrum has driven league coaches and officials into months of self-examination on how to change it, from nonconference scheduling to public messaging about perception of the league’s top-to-bottom quality.
“We have to get a fair amount of teams into the tournament for that national respect,” Syracuse coach Adrian Autry said Thursday during the “ACC Tipoff” preseason media days. “Which is crazy to me, because every time we get into the tournament, our teams all do well. So that should be enough credibility.”
“It’s not been one year. It’s been several years of this narrative. … As you start the following year, you would think that (NCAA success) would account for something. But obviously it doesn’t.”
The league keeps winning in March in spite of having three straight seasons with just five bids from its 15-team membership, which has expanded with the additions of California, Stanford and SMU this year.
Past tournament performance isn’t part of the bid evaluation, but it’s a story the ACC is trying to spread. That’s why commissioner Jim Phillips went on the offensive in April during N.C. State’s miraculous trip to the Final Four, which made the Wolfpack the fourth different league team — joining Duke, North Carolina and Miami — to reach college basketball’s final weekend in three years.
Fittingly, the Wolfpack had to win an all-ACC regional final against the Blue Devils. That, along with Clemson’s run to the program’s first-ever Elite Eight on the other side of the bracket, gave Phillips an I-told-you-so argument on the bids — notably with a 22-win Pittsburgh team that had fallen on the wrong side of the ACC’s shrinking bid bubble weeks earlier.
But the ACC couldn’t just point at the scoreboard, so to speak, and do nothing else.
“It’s become so frustrating to see teams left out at the end of the year — teams like Pittsburgh and Wake Forest (last year), or Clemson (in 2023), when to me and to others, it just made so much sense for them to be in there,” Phillips told The Associated Press.
“But I got it, you can’t be so stubborn. I think you have to adjust and you have to change some of your ways in how you’re attacking it and that’s what we did this season.”
It was difficult to envision this scenario after the ACC added Syracuse, Pittsburgh and Notre Dame from the Big East ahead of the 2013-14 season. The record then was seven tournament bids, but the target soon became to reach 10, floated publicly again and again.
The league twice got to nine (2017, 2018) during a run that included Duke winning the 2015 title, UNC reaching the 2016 final then winning the 2017 crown, and Virginia winning its first NCAA title in 2019 under Tony Bennett — now the only active ACC head coach with an NCAA title.
Yet bids have dried up since the COVID-19 pandemic even as the success kept coming.
Going back to 2015, the ACC has 10 more Sweet 16 appearances (31) and eight more Elite Eights (19) than the Big 12 as the next closest league, while its nine Final Fours and three titles are the most in the country. Its 111 tournament wins in that span is 28 more than the Big 12 and Big Ten as the next-closest league, according to Sportradar.
And that success has been spread across the membership: 10 different programs have reached at least one Elite Eight, six going to the Final Four.
Yet the ACC’s 60 bids trailed the Big Ten (65) and Big 12 (61) in that time, and the conference hasn’t ranked higher than fifth in KenPom’s efficiency rankings dating to the 2020-21 season.
That’s why league coaches and athletics directors have been studying how to enhance NCAA resumes through an en-masse effort, notably by strengthening nonconference schedules beyond arranged made-for-TV pairings such as the ACC/SEC Challenge.
That work has already begun, such as N.C. State scheduling a series with national power Kansas, Wake Forest with Michigan, and Pittsburgh with Ohio State, all starting this season.
“Obviously we heard everything at the end about why we didn’t make the tournament, with strength of schedule,” Pitt coach Jeff Capel said of visiting the Buckeyes on Nov. 29.
“So this year we just looked at it and said … ‘What can we control?’ .. It’s a Big Ten team. We know their stuff will be high like it is every year, their metrics, so hopefully that helps us.”
It would help, too, if two of the ACC’s top brands returned to perennial success in Syracuse and Louisville. Autry’s Orange last played in the NCAAs in 2021, while the Cardinals last went in 2019 and have gone 12-52 the past two seasons for the worst 2-year stretch in program history.
“I heard that loud and clear at the ACC spring meetings,” first-year Louisville coach Pat Kelsey said with a chuckle. “I mean, I am the new guy. I was just sitting over there in the corner, I wasn’t saying anything. … (But) they made it very clear that Louisville being really good helps everybody.”
The good news for the ACC is there’s plenty of talent back, starting with UNC fifth-year guard RJ Davis as the lone returning first-team AP All-American and Wake Forest guard Hunter Sallis as a returning first-team AP All-ACC pick. The list includes the league rookie of the year (Notre Dame’s Markus Burton) and top sixth man (Pitt’s Ishmael Leggett).
And then there’s the arrival of heralded Duke freshman Cooper Flagg, mentioned as a possible No. 1 overall NBA draft pick long before ever arriving in Durham.
The work now turns to the final step in changing the narrative: winning, from November to March.
“I think the years before when I was there, I think everyone was all about the ACC and it kind of died down a little bit,” Davis said. “I’m not sure what the reason is because the talent’s always there. … So I think we just have to continue to keep doing what we’re doing as a conference, and I think people start to notice a little bit more.”
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