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ACC is taking steps to get more respect as a new college basketball season looms


No conference has more recent NCAA men's tournament success than the ACC, but it hasn't resulted in more spots in the field. League is trying to change that.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Over the last three runs through March Madness, no conference has had more to celebrate than the ACC: Four different programs reaching a Final Four, filling seven of the 24 spots in the Elite Eight and earning 33 overall tournament wins.

In all three categories, the ACC has been the best-performing conference despite ranking fourth over that span in number of tournament bids. 

Which is exactly the problem, as the ACC sees it. Why has this become college basketball’s Rodney Dangerfield conference? Why can’t it get any respect?

“It doesn’t really make any sense,” said North Carolina State coach Kevin Keatts, whose team contributed to that March success by making a surprise Final Four run last season

And the disrespect continues as a new season looms. The preseason Paste BN Sports men's college basketball coaches poll finds only two teams worthy of a ranking: Duke at No. 5 and North Carolina at No. 10. 

Meanwhile, the ACC is bigger with the additions of California, Stanford and SMU bringing the league to 18 members and maybe better as a whole with some recent bottom-feeders potentially getting their act together. 

But in the end, there’s no doubt commissioner Jim Phillips has a mandate to improve the ACC’s positioning relative to its peers in the eyes of the NCAA tournament selection committee. For a league whose history and tradition are intertwined with college basketball, receiving just 15 total bids over the last three tournaments while the Big Ten and SEC have gotten 23 and 22, respectively, is an embarrassment and an outrage. 

“We have to tell our story better,” Phillips said. 

But the ACC doesn’t merely have a narrative problem. The reason for its low bid count is mostly just math. The analytics used by the committee to sort and seed teams, which are largely influenced by non-conference performance and schedule strength, haven’t flattered the ACC recently.

Since going to a 20-game conference schedule five years ago, ACC teams have had fewer opportunities early in the season to put non-conference wins on the board. And whether it’s transfer-heavy teams struggling to jell early in the season or a disproportionate number of teams going through difficult coaching transitions, ACC teams have carried too many bad losses and too few good wins into conference play, where they can boost each other’s computer numbers. 

That’s how you end up with a team like Wake Forest going 13-7, 10-10 and 11-9 in the ACC each of the last three years and ending up on the wrong side of the bubble every time. And it’s especially hard to take for coach Steve Forbes when, as an example, his team last season logged wins over NC State, Duke and Clemson – all of whom ended up in the Elite Eight – but didn’t quite have a good enough résumé to get in the at-large bid conversation. 

“We didn’t win the right games,” Forbes said. “What happens when you’re on the bubble, the pressure builds. It’s just not fun. We had some huge wins, but then you lose a couple road games you probably shouldn’t, and it costs you when you’re on the cut line.”

Phillips said the ACC commissioned a detailed statistical analysis to help teams optimize their non-conference scheduling as it relates to the NET rankings, which is the primary tool the NCAA uses to group teams in quadrants. 

In basic terms, teams improve their NET by beating top-30 opponents at home, top-50 opponents on a neutral court or top 75-opponents on the road. They hurt their NET by losing at home to teams ranked outside the top-75 or losing in any venue to a team outside the top-100. 

Some critics of the NET think it’s too easy to game the system and it doesn’t necessarily reflect the true quality of a league, especially when a conference has grown as big as the ACC. However, math is math, and you’re better off figuring out how to make it work in your favor. 

But you also have to win non-conference games early in the season to feed good numbers into the machine, and that’s something only ACC teams can control. 

“We need to be smarter as a conference, the way we schedule in non-conference, and we have to control winning,” Duke’s Jon Scheyer said. “But still for me, playing in the ACC and coaching the different styles of play, the different teams you play, prepares you the best for the tournament. There’s nothing you don’t see.”

The numbers in March have proven that. When you look at how many different ACC schools have gone deep in the tournament – it’s not just Duke and North Carolina – the league probably has been undervalued by the committee. 

But a huge piece of the puzzle will be figuring out how to get some of the league’s traditionally strong programs back on track. There’s little doubt that the disaster at Louisville in two seasons under Kenny Payne, the significant downturn at Florida State and the slippage in the final seasons of Mike Brey at Notre Dame and Jim Boeheim at Syracuse contributed to the bad analytics and public perception. 

And that path gets even more complicated when you consider Tony Bennett’s shocking decision last week to retire at Virginia. When you combine that with recent exits by Mike Krzyzewski, Roy Williams, Boeheim and Brey, no league has had to replace so many legends in such a short period of time. 

“Every league is going to go through this at some point,” Forbes said. “It’s one reason why my agent told me to take the job because these guys are going to retire. There’s just been a lot of transition, but I think we’re stable.”

When the season begins, ACC fans will be closely watching the bottom of the conference. First-year coach Pat Kelsey looks like he’s on the path to get Louisville going pretty quickly. Damon Stoudamire has elevated the talent at Georgia Tech. There have been good signs from Boston College, and Micah Shrewsberry’s track record at Penn State should translate to a successful rebuild at Notre Dame. 

If those teams can avoid bad losses early on, the ACC may finally start to get some love from the committee.

“We have had a drag at the bottom of the conference because of rebuilds or new coaching situations or the transfer portal, and that has really influenced some of those rankings, some of the metrics overall that they're looking at,” Phillips said. “Whether we like it or not, the narrative starts to get set in November and in December in the non-conference games. You have to perform at a greater level.”