ACC ‘not as good ... as it thinks it is’: Perception vs. reality in NCAA bracket selection
Anxiety has morphed into reluctant acceptance for the ACC now that NCAA selection Sunday is here.
Long a league that’s received as many or more NCAA Tournament bids than most conferences, the ACC is poised to get as few as four but likely no more than five teams in the tournament when the bracket is revealed Sunday at 6 p.m. Since the memorable 2019 season that saw three ACC teams receive No. 1 seeds among the seven ACC teams in that year’s field, the league sent seven teams again to the tournament in 2021 with none seeded higher than No. 4.
Five ACC teams made the tournament in both 2022 and 2023. At the time, ACC coaches and administrators lamented so few.
Sunday, they’d be glad to see five teams in this year’s field, because that number is considered a long shot. N.C. State (22-14) won the automatic bid with its improbable ACC championship, of course. UNC (27-7), Duke (24-8) and Clemson (21-11) have resumes that allow them to be certain they’ll be at-large selections in this year’s tournament.
But the bid the Wolfpack stole by rising from the ACC Tournament’s No. 10 seed to make the NCAA field might very well be from ACC counterparts Pitt (22-11) and Virginia (23-10), who nervously wonder if they’ll be the league’s fifth or sixth entrants.
NIT bound at best, Wake Forest laments losing four of its last six games to drop out of NCAA tournament consideration.
How did the ACC get here? Coaches insist the perception the league is down is not reality. ESPN’s Joe Lunardi, who has projected NCAA Tournament brackets for the last 30 years, disagrees.
“It’s not a perception problem, it’s a basketball problem,” Lunardi said Friday. “The ACC is not as good at basketball as it thinks it is and as it historically has been.”
The ACC ceded the top spot among conferences to the Big 12, which is poised to have nine teams in the tournament, and the SEC, which is likely to see eight teams earn bids.
Ken Pomeroy’s conference rankings, based on analytics and efficiency, has the ACC as the No. 5 league in the nation, trailing the Big 12, Big East, Big Ten and SEC.
The ACC was No. 7 last season, also behind the Pac-12 and Mountain West conferences.
In 2021 and 2022, KenPom had the ACC the nation’s No. 5 league. In 2019, the ACC was No. 3, while in 2018 it was No. 2.
The league’s flagging performance in national metrics has it in the current position of longing for more bids instead of earning them.
While the ACC has impressively placed three teams in the Final Four over the past two tournaments, those accomplishments don’t matter when it comes to picking this year’s field.
But, the ACC may have something happen today that’s closer to its past levels.
Ranked No. 4 nationally, UNC is in position to be the ACC’s first No. 1 seed since 2019 even after dropping the ACC final to N.C. State.
At No. 10 in the NCAA Evaluation Tool (NET) ratings and No. 8 in Ken Pomeroy’s ratings nationally, Duke figures to be either a No. 3 or No. 4 seed after losing to N.C. State in the ACC Tournament quarterfinals.
Last season, the ACC had no teams seeded better than No. 4 while in 2022, had just one team rated higher than No. 8.
The third ACC team headed to the tournament with an at-large bid this season, Clemson, had a strong enough nonconference record to overcome its 11-9 league record as well as being ousted by Boston College in the ACC Tournament’s second round. The Tigers are No. 34 in KenPom.com and No. 36 in the NET.
Despite making the ACC Tournament semifinals and pushing top-seeded UNC hard before losing, 72-65, on Friday night, Pitt’s case for NCAA Tournament inclusion is muddied by its poor nonconference strength of schedule. The Panthers are No. 343 nationally in that category, including a 71-64 home loss on Nov. 28 to a Missouri team that went winless in the SEC.
So even though Pitt won ACC road games over Duke and Virginia, the Panthers are in danger not making the field. That’s even more true after N.C. State earned its bid.
“What we know is they have a non conference schedule rank of 343,” Lunardi said. “There has never been a bubble team that got a bid with anything close to that. And the reason is simple. They don’t want to incent teams to do that. And as inconsistent as the committee can be year over year over a year, I’ve been doing this for a little while, and that is the single most applied metric in my 30 years.”
Pitt coach Jeff Capel, whose team is ranked No. 41 nationally in the NET and No. 40 KenPom, said he had no intention of his schedule being such a negative issue.
“We thought we had a really good schedule,’ Capel said Friday night. “We didn’t know West Virginia would turn out like they were. They were picked high in the Big 12. We didn’t know that Missouri wouldn’t win a game. When we played them, they were pretty good. We didn’t know they wouldn’t win a game in the SEC.
Virginia reeled off eight consecutive wins over late January and early February to put itself in strong position to make the NCAA Tournament. But after topping out at 19-5, the Cavaliers stumbled down the stretch with five losses in their past nine games, including Friday night’s ACC Tournament semifinal collapse against N.C. State, when Virginia squandered a six-point lead in the final 51 seconds of regulation and lost 73-65 in overtime.
Asked early Saturday morning what he’d say to the selection committee, Virginia coach Tony Bennett sounded resigned that his team’s fate is out of its control now. His Cavaliers are No. 68 according to KenPom.com and No. 55 in the NET.
“This league is good, but no amount of politicking, no amount of stuff,” Bennett said. “They’re going to get behind closed doors and you trust that they’ll look at it and see the eye test and all those things. There’s so much talk going on out there, it’s too much. So get behind closed doors, make the right decision, and these guys I think represented themselves well.”