The ACC: Down, But Not Out

This year has been awful for the ACC, but the conference will be back.

The ACC’s overwhelming rout in its early-December challenge series with the SEC continues to reverberate, amplified by the vagaries of an ongoing, scantily regulated NIL environment.

For the second time in four seasons, through the end of calendar year 2024, Duke is the sole ACC team ranked in the AP’s top 25. Jim Larranaga’s abrupt, mid-season resignation at Miami immediately after Christmas was another clear signal something is amiss; what was once the nation’s premier men’s circuit now leads the way in coaching disarray.

Larranaga was replaced by Bill Courtney, a member of his staff. Barring a stunning turnaround, Courtney’s tenure is limited to the current season. Virginia’s Tony Bennett similarly was succeeded by assistant Ron Sanchez this past fall.

Stability has ceased suddenly to be a characteristic of ACC men’s basketball. Player turnover is now epidemic, with NIL money a semi-transparent inducement. “What shocked me beyond belief was after we made it to the Final Four just 18 months ago, the very first time I met with the players, eight of them decided they were going to put their name in the portal and leave,” The Athletic’s Manny Navarro quoted Larrañaga.

Six multi-decade head coaches have departed in the past four years, two of them Hall of Famers, five of them with more victories than anyone else in their school’s history (Larranaga, Bennett, Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim, Notre Dame’s Mike Brey, and Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski). Five of them combined to account for 30 Final Four berths and 10 NCAA titles, counting North Carolina’s Roy Williams, a 2021 retiree.

The sole remaining ACC coach to reach a Final Four is UNC’s fourth-year leader, Hubert Davis, no Hall of Fame candidate so far. Like it or not, Duke and Carolina are the pillars on which the league’s reputation perches. With the Heels inconsistent under Davis, the ACC looks weaker.

While it surely mattered that league leaders bent over backwards to boost football, that investment has yielded middling league-wide results beyond TV revenues swelling coffers. Meanwhile relatively little modern basketball prowess was supplied by the 10 programs added this century. Of the newcomers, only Syracuse and Louisville came as established men’s basketball powers, each a recent NCAA titlist.

The Orange have finished higher than fifth just once since joining the ACC in 2013-14.The Cardinals have been a mess thanks to slack oversight – at best —under Rick Pitino that sent the program into a tailspin.

It may be that differentials in revenue and emphasis compared to other leagues are a major factor in basketball’s recent oncourt retreat. But studies have shown players don’t pick teams based on facilities, no matter how gaudy. Look instead to talent draining from player ranks like oil from a busted gasket, and not just via school switches. As Larranaga learned painfully, outside allures are increasingly influential.

Then, too, the NBA draft annually skims top developing talent from well-stocked rosters – of the ACC’s 16 first-rounders in the past four years, 13 were underclassmen, 10 freshmen. Eight came from Duke, remarkably kept on stride under Jon Scheyer.

Other leagues confront similar if not equivalent pressures.

But the ACC was accustomed to more. As recently as 2019 the league was riding high, with the top three teams in the final AP poll, seven NCAA entrants out of 15 league members, five squads reaching the Sweet Sixteen, Duke in the Final Eight, and UVa winning the ACC’s 15^th championship in its 66^th year of existence.

Then came COVID and the world shifted. The last two years: just five NCAA participants annually came from the ACC, though lost in the deepened gloom of scant pickings were an unlikely pair of Final Four entrants in Miami and NC State.

Leagues, like programs and players, have their cycles of fortune. For every 2019 season, there’s the troubling stretch when each year from 2011 through 2013 only four of 12 ACC teams made the NCAAs and none got to a Final Four.

Speculate on what’s wrong with the ACC. Go ahead and gauge the rise and fall of the conference’s popular and competitive stature by means of NET, KenPom, Sagarin, AP or UPI poll ratings. Tally NCAA berths. Or even consider wins and losses. Measure and compare.

Or, based on decades of precedent, await a probable shift in tide, however long that takes.