For the ACC, the NCAA tournament is a chance to rewrite the story of this season
It’s rare the ACC goes into the NCAA tournament with anything to prove other than ultimate supremacy. Whether that’s a national champion or multiple teams in the Final Four or the most wins overall, the ACC has claimed victory in at least one of those categories in each of the past five tournaments.
No conference has ever won more NCAA games over a five-year span than the ACC did from 2015-19.
In Year Six, after a one-year gap, the ACC has to prove it belongs.
For the first time since seeding began in 1979, no ACC team was seeded higher than fourth Sunday. The ACC did have seven teams selected, two short of the ACC record set in 2017 and 2018, with snubbed Louisville first in line as a COVID replacement team.
As was the case during the regular season, the ACC had its strength in depth but not in power at the top.
Virginia and Florida State led the way as No. 4 seeds. Clemson is a No. 7. North Carolina is a No. 8. Georgia Tech is a No. 9. Virginia Tech is a No. 10. Syracuse is a No. 11. Louisville is on special alert in case a 38th at-large is needed.
That’s not a particularly impressive group of seedings, but it pretty accurately represents the state of the ACC.
The ACC wasn’t necessarily down, the way it was last year; the lack of national-title contenders just made it feel that way. Fourth-place Georgia Tech winning the championship underlined how egalitarian the league actually was this season, although losing Virginia to COVID before the semifinals helped narrow the gap.
That perception hurt Louisville more than anyone in the end, but for the most part the ACC’s seeds fell how the bracketologists thought they would. It’s a crazy thing that the ACC champion is a No. 9 seed and the ACC’s third-place team is a No. 10 seed, but it was a crazy year.
The thing is, whether it is efficiency ratings or the NCAA committee making those assessments now — and they generally agree with each other — no one is going to remember them in three weeks. All anyone is going to remember is how the ACC performs in the NCAA tournament. It’s all still out there.
Some years, especially when the ACC is particularly strong, the one-and-done nature of the NCAA tournament can work against it. Virginia lost to UMBC. Duke lost to Mercer … and Lehigh. There’s many a slip twixt the first round and the Final Four, and the “best” teams often fall along the way. Typically about half of the ACC’s invitees make it to the second weekend either way, in good years and bad.
This year, it’s a clean slate and an open opportunity. With seven lottery tickets, the ACC has seven chances to wipe out whatever narrative exists now and replace it with a new one.
Send Virginia and Florida State to the Final Four as No. 4 seeds, or the majority of the seven to the Sweet 16, and the perception could skew from an ACC that was soft at the top to one that was actually full of really good teams that beat up on each other, did damage through friendly fire, and obscured the true strength of the league.
We have metrics that accurately measure this stuff, and they say the ACC is a league with a bunch of good teams and no great ones, the fifth-best conference in the country, a hair behind the Big East, but with eight of the top 50 teams in the country. The numbers are clear.
By the time March turns to April, they will be almost irrelevant.
The NCAA tournament is what really writes the history, and it does it with a broad-tipped permanent marker that blots out just about everything that happened before. You are what your tournament record says you are.
For the ACC this season, it’s a chance to be something else entirely.
This story was originally published March 14, 2021 at 7:21 PM.
