Cooper Flagg Moving Up Another List

Not many players have won this many ACC Rookie Of The Week awards

He’s made it a habit, dwarfing his peers. No one who’s seen Cooper Flagg in action will be surprised by how thoroughly he’s commanded the ACC’s weekly award for outstanding play by a freshman.

The honor is not widely noted, let alone celebrated, although it’s league-wide recognition that ACC publicists have tracked and shared weekly since the 1972-73 season. That’s a lot of water under the bridge.

Being chosen as the ACC Rookie of the Year can be a harbinger of better things, if only because the honoree’s talent and skill are so obvious. Of the 14 men who previously won the award six or more times for their performance during their initial season of college competition, a dozen went on to become first-round NBA draft choices. (The exceptions were Virginia’s Sylvan Landesberg, who won the award in 2009 but didn’t advance to a spot in the pro draft, and Duke’s Kyle Filipowski, who went in the 2024 second round.)

Entering this season half of the top vote-getting yearlings in garnering weekly honors (7 of 14) had played for Duke. This year Flagg already has clinched becoming the eighth of 15.

In fact, by early February, Flagg had been named the ACC’s premier rookie nine times in 13 weeks. That tied him with former Blue Devil Jahlil Okafor for sixth-most weekly wins in the 52 years the league has recognized a premier freshman.

Collecting the Rookie of the Week award isn’t synonymous with advancing to being named the ACC Rookie of the Year, but it’s close.

Notre Dame’s Markus Burton, winner of the annual award in 2024, when he led the Irish in scoring, was among five recipients of the weekly honor who returned this year. He hasn’t had the impact to repeat, however. Burton, injured much of this season, was named ROW four times in ’24 compared to three for Georgia Tech’s Baye Ndongo and once each for NC State’s Dennis Parker, Pitt’s leading 2025 scorer Jaland Lowe, and Notre Dame sharpshooter Braeden Shrewberry.

Duke leads with 14 Rookies of the Year (ROY) since 1971, almost certainly 15 recipients if you take Flagg as a given. Next closest is Georgia Tech; Derrick Favors was its 11^th and last winner in 2010.

Incidentally these are awards the league lately took upon itself to control in-house, removing them from open, independent selection by ACC media members.

The weekly award was first designated during the 1972-73 season, the first year freshmen were eligible for varsity competition. (What an ancient concept the ban on freshman participation seems now! It changed immediately after the great David Thompson became a sophomore.)

The ACC Rookie of the Year award was first given in 1976 to Duke’s Jim Spanarkel. Building a competitive program, coach Bill Foster brought to Durham three of the first four league Rookies of the Year: Spanarkel, Mike Gminski in 1977, when NC State’s Charles (Hawkeye) Whitney shared the honor, and Gene Banks in 1978.

Only three freshmen, all from Duke and all recently, were selected as ACC Player of the Year after dominating the weekly awards: Okafor in 2015, Marvin Bagley III in 2018, and Zion Williamson in 2019. None of them was named a Rookie of the Week more often than Flagg, potentially making him as incomparable as advertised.