For decades, the Atlantic Coast Conference was synonymous with college basketball excellence. The conference of David Thompson, Michael Jordan, Christian Laettner and Tim Duncan, of Jim Valvano, Dean Smith, and Mike Krzyzewski produced basketball royalty and claimed a bonanza of national titles.
Now the league is making a different kind of history.
When the NCAA Tournament field is unveiled Sunday, it is expected to include just three or four of the ACC’s 18 teams — the smallest percentage of conference teams in the field since tournament expansion four decades ago.
The cold reality, obscured in recent years by tournament success by its dwindling number of entrants, can no longer be ignored: The league’s heyday is long gone, its legendary coaches retired, and its status as the nation’s top league diminished, undone by a confluence of factors in the fast-changing world of college athletics.
“The ACC does not have a perception problem,” ESPN bracket expert Joe Lunardi said last week. “The ACC is the greatest basketball conference college basketball has ever seen historically. The ACC has a basketball problem.”
Lunardi consulted with the ACC last off-season when the league did an extensive statistical analysis to find a way to get more teams into the tournament, college basketball’s showcase event. The ACC underwent the exercise — which included statistical modeling on scheduling and its impact on selection criteria, working groups of coaches and athletic directors, conversations with television partners — because it had gotten just five of its 15 teams into the tournament three years running.
This year, five teams would be an improvement for the ACC.
Nearly five years into the name, image and likeness era, which essentially allows schools to entice talent with money, ACC schools have fallen behind. Immediate eligibility for transfers has turned each offseason into free agency, forcing programs to retain and acquire talent on an annual basis.
“This has to do with the players on your roster and, at the end of the day, what are you willing to do in terms of compensating them?” Lunardi said. “And I can [rank] 1 to 68 colleges and universities with the best of them … but on any of our data sheets, there is not a column for NIL — at least not yet.”
Changing of the guard
On the walls of the press room at the Greensboro Coliseum — the longtime home to the ACC Tournament — there are front pages chronicling the history of the league. The framed copies are fading now. The tournament makes less frequent stops in Greensboro, where the league was born but no longer is headquartered. The old building carries a new name: First Horizon Coliseum.
The men stalking the sidelines have different names now, too. Krzyzewski (Duke), Roy Williams (North Carolina), Jim Boeheim (Syracuse), Mike Brey (Notre Dame), Tony Bennett (Virginia), Leonard Hamilton (Florida State) and Jim Larranaga (Miami) have departed since 2021.
That group combined for 5,540 career victories, 29 Final Four appearances and 10 national titles.
Of the active coaches in the ACC, none has won a national title as a head coach, and just one has reached a Final Four: North Carolina’s Hubert Davis in his first season.
“We’re not the ACC of old,” Wake Forest coach Steve Forbes said.
Duke’s Jon Scheyer could join that list this year, equipped with a roster stacked with NBA first-round talent, including projected No. 1 draft pick Cooper Flagg, and key transfers.
But he’s the only replacement for those accomplished veteran coaches who has been an unqualified success. Miami and Florida State hired new coaches after the regular season ended. Virginia’s job is open after Bennett’s preseason retirement.
“We’ve lost a bunch of hall-of-fame coaches,” Forbes said. “We’ve got some really good young coaches that are going to be really good and they’re recruiting at a high level. We’ve got to continue to recruit really good players.”
He continued: “Jon is doing it, and the rest of us got to continue to get better.”
Got to win games
Scheyer and Duke delivered the league’s biggest non-conference win of the season: a victory over Auburn out of the Southeastern Conference. But the annual early season series between the two conferences was a turning point in the season.
The SEC won 14 of 16 games with only Duke and Clemson (over Kentucky) earning victories for the ACC, an outcome that delivered a double whammy: cementing the SEC as the better league and hurting the ACC’s computer rankings.
It wasn’t an anomaly, either. On the season, the SEC went 30-4 against the ACC. The ACC also had losing records against the Big 12 (3-8), Big East (2-5) and Big Ten (8-9).
Buoyed by its overwhelming nonconference success, the SEC is poised to place as many as 14 of its 16 teams in the NCAA Tournament.
No amount of schedule modeling, enhanced scheduling or media spin can erase on-court results.
“We’ve got to win games in the nonconference,” Notre Dame coach Micah Shrewsberry said. “We can’t get waxed by the SEC in the league thing. We’ve got to win games in that.”
Non-conference success or failure creates a feedback loop once leagues begin conference play. The NCAA committee that selects teams for the tournament considers, among its criteria, performance in “Quad 1” games according to the NCAA Evaluation Tool, or NET.
Games can be Quad 1, 2, 3 or 4, depending on an opponent’s rank in the NET, which is constantly moving. The location of the game — home, away, neutral — also factors in. The SEC’s strong out-of-conference performance meant that nearly every league matchup was a Quad 1 game, giving the winner a boost and not hurting the loser.
Opportunities for big wins were much more limited in the ACC. North Carolina, for example, has won eight of its last 10 games. None of the wins were Quad 1 games.
Forbes said 10 of Wake’s 20 league games were Quad 3 or Quad 4 games. Wins in those games do little to improve your NCAA Tournament hopes. Losses, however, are extremely damaging. Wake Forest and Pitt, which were bubble teams at one point, each lost at NC State, which finished 16th in the conference and didn’t qualify for the ACC Tournament.
“When they walk in here because of some number of a NET and they lose these games, it destroys their hopes of making the tournament,” said former NC State coach Kevin Keatts, who was fired after the season. “That was not the vision of the ACC.”
Stanford first-year coach Kyle Smith proposed one potential solution to the ACC’s Quad 1 problem. The idea, one he has pitched to ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips, is to divide the league into nine-team divisions based on a five-year rolling average of success. By playing each division member twice, teams in the top division would have more opportunities to pick up résumé-boosting victories. Rebuilding teams could have a better chance to earn victories in the second division. Each year, teams could move up and down like in the relegation and promotion system used in English soccer’s professional leagues, such as the EFL Championship or Premier League.
“I do think that would give you more opportunities if you played everyone twice in the top division,” said Smith, whose Cardinal team won 20 games and went 11-9 in league play, marks that in previous years would nearly guarantee an ACC team a spot in the NCAA Tournament. “Champions and Premier League; I’ve been working on this.You would have two divisions and then at the end of the year, you’d relegate someone, but that top division would play each other twice so you’d get more Quad 1s, and it would be pretty neat.”
Such a proposal would likely cause scheduling issues and could fail to account for teams experiencing dramatic turnarounds, such as Louisville, which rose from the bottom of the standings to second in the regular season under new coach Pat Kelsey.
But the ACC has implemented dramatically uneven revenue distribution based on success and brand metrics. Perhaps more experimentation is needed.
Forbes suggested moving the ACC-SEC Challenge from November to February or reducing the number of conference games from 20 to 18. The latter may be frowned upon by TV partner ESPN. The league could play high-profile four-team events across the country — New York City’s Madison Square Garden, Las Vegas, Charlotte or Greensboro — to attract attention, create value for ESPN and produce more enticing matchups.
Dick Vitale calls on the ACC to adapt better to modern college sports.
“This league’s gotta do a better job of handling the NIL and the Transfer Portal and get stronger. This conference, for years, was the best. And I’m telling you right now, it has taken a real hit.” pic.twitter.com/SLLhJvGNI6
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) March 16, 2025
Money talks
Such moves might help. More talent, more money and more wins would help more.
Keatts, who led the Wolfpack to the Final Four in 2024, was vocal about the impact of money on his ability to construct a consistent winner in the league.
“It’s the No. 1 recruiting tool now,” Keats said after his final home game. “As great as this building [Lenovo Center] is and all of the great graphics that we hung up over in our practice facility, the main thing they want to know [is] how much revenue sharing now that I’m going to get. So you’ve got to figure that part out.”
As NC State searches for its next head coach, the Wolfpack’s 1Pack collective — which raises money from fans and supporters and uses it to acquire and retain players, who often have to make minimal appearances — is pushing fans to help give him a bigger budget for talent acquisition. The collective saw membership increase by 20% along with a surge in one-time donations by existing members.
North Carolina hired a general manager for its basketball program in part to better navigate the transfer portal, where the Tar Heels largely struck out in the offseason.
With direct revenue sharing coming to the NCAA, money will continue to be a primary factor. It may boost the Big East and other non-football-playing conferences that can devote more of those resources to men’s basketball. The SEC’s financial prowess — when it comes to hiring established coaches and building rosters — is clearly making an impact.
Fourteen players from current ACC schools transferred to the SEC before the 2024-25 season, and 10 of them are starters, including third-team All-SEC selections Mark Mitchell (Duke to Missouri) and Sean Pedulla (Virginia Tech to Ole Miss). Conversely, seven players made the SEC-to-ACC move, a list headlined by North Carolina part-time starter Ven-Allen Lubin (Vanderbilt).
Of the top 100 transfers this offseason, according to On3’s rankings, 26 went to SEC schools and 14 picked ACC schools.
“We’re not privy to what they’re spending at Auburn versus what they’re spending at Pitt, let’s say,” Lunardi said. “But something has changed in the macroeconomics that is causing [this].”
Signs of the ACC’s decline were evident during last week’s ACC Tournament in Charlotte. Once the crown jewel of basketball tournaments, this year’s event lacked the buzz of years past — in terms of attendance and matchups. ESPN sent its top announcing crew to the SEC Tournament, where seven of the top 25 teams, including four of the top eight, were playing.
What the ACC has hung its hat on is overperformance in the NCAA Tournament. Four different programs have reached the Final Four in the last three seasons, despite the relative paucity of bids.
And the league may be able to make that argument again this year. Top-ranked Duke has a chance to cut down the nets in San Antonio — the Blue Devils are that good. Louisville and Clemson also can’t be dismissed. North Carolina could make noise if it were to get into the field — a giant “if,” given the holes in the Tar Heels’ résumé. No one expected NC State to reach the Final Four after it snuck into the field last season.
March success leads directly to financial gain through the NCAA’s distribution formula. The SEC is likely to reap a windfall from this year’s tournament, only adding to its warchest. The ACC’s success initiative rewards member schools directly for tournament victories. The tournament gives the ACC a chance to change the narrative that’s dogged it all season. But it won’t — or shouldn’t, at least — prevent the league and its members from finding improvements.
Said Lunardi: “They have work to do to catch the other power leagues, both on and off the court.”
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