ACC basketball’s middle class holds the key to reversing the negative narrative

CHARLOTTE, NC – So much for being subtle.

Because the ACC apparently didn’t mince its words with new Louisville coach Pat Kelsey during the spring meetings in May.

Pat, meet expectations; expectations, Pat. You will be Real familiar with each other.

“They’ve made it very clear that being really good at Louisville helps everyone,” Kelsey joked Thursday during the league’s basketball event. “No pressure, coach.”

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Bone? Maybe. But given Louisville’s historic success — it’s one of six ACC programs to win a national title in the modern era — versus the recent… uh, not success, it is easy to understand the perspective of the competition. The point is, Louisville isn’t the only program that hasn’t delivered lately — and that’s how the ACC finds itself in its current predicament, fighting uphill against a narrative that’s difficult to break.

It wasn’t that long ago, from 2015 through 2019, that the ACC could reasonably claim it was college basketball’s premier conference. During those five seasons, it produced three separate national champions (Duke, North Carolina and Virginia), four other teams made at least one Elite Eight (Louisville, Notre Dame, Syracuse and Florida State), and finished no lower than third in the KenPom Conference . rankings and received more NCAA Tournament bids (38) than any other league.

ACC commissioner Jim Phillips’ conference will have three new teams this basketball season in California, SMU and Stanford. (Jim Dedmon/Imagn Images)

But since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, that perception has taken a nosedive. The ACC is not ready yet better then ranked fourth in KenPom’s conference rankings since 2021, hitting a complete low in 2023 when it somehow finished seventh, behind every other major conference and even the Mountain West. The NCAA Tournament bids have followed the same downward trajectory; The ACC’s invite total over the past three seasons is the fewest in three years. And even then, the league’s eight top-four seeds were twice as many as in the previous three seasons.

Which brings you to ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips, already embroiled in the numerous other pitfalls of college athletics, publicly advocating for his league’s chances in the postseason…weeks before a game has even been played.

“From top to bottom,” Phillips said, “this league is undervalued.”

This is the most important and core of the ACC’s dilemma: despite the lackluster postseason invites, despite any analytics problems, the league remains has carried out when it matters most: in March. Even with just 15 low bids over the past three seasons, the ACC has the most NCAA tournament wins of any conference — even more than the Big East, despite Connecticut’s back-to-back national championships — and the most Final Four teams (four).

“I’ll capitalize on it,” NC State coach Kevin Keatts said. “We’re not going to the Final Four if we don’t compete in the ACC, where we’ll be tested in the 20 games we play.”

So, what gives? Why disconnect? And how does the ACC solve its perception problem, if at all? The Venn diagram of those answers is a circle: improve the middle and bottom rungs of the competition. And for the first time in a long time, there is a realistic belief that this is possible.

Louisville is, of course, the most obvious example. The Cardinals just easily endured their two worst seasons in program history, going a disastrous 12-52 in two seasons under Kenny Payne. But realistically, the team’s problems are less than two years old; UL has not appeared in the NCAA Tournament since 2019 and has not produced a single first-round NBA draft pick since 2019. A big reason why the ACC added Louisville in the 2010s in the first place was because of its men’s basketball prowess, so yeah…I’d love to see that materialize again.

And without being too sure about it – Payne was a slam-dunk hire until he wasn’t – Kelsey has put himself in position to pull off one of the sport’s biggest flips year after year. The 49-year-old brought in a brand new roster in his first offseason, one that is the oldest and most experienced in the entire ACC. Accordingly, The Athletics ranked the Cards third in the ACC preseason predictions.

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But Louisville is not alone. Several recent bottom-feeders in the league appear poised to approach respectability this season and possibly the NCAA Tournament. And if they do? Well, the league’s perception could be resolved quite quickly.

Take Wake Forest, which has been on the wrong side of the bubble for three years in a row. Between Chris Paul and Tim Duncan, the Demon Deacons have a storied basketball history in their own right… yet they haven’t won an NCAA Tournament game since 2010. (Ish Smith, who made the winning shot in Wake Forest’s Madness last March’s win, squeezed in an entire 14-year NBA career since his alma mater pulled off another such victory.) More recently, Steve Forbes has spent the past three seasons produced two ACC Players of the Year: Alondes Williams in 2022 and Ty Appleby (who won AP honors, but not the public vote) in 2023 – and had a third player become a first-round draft pick (Jake LaRavia in 2022) , but still hasn’t made the elusive Big Dance.

“If (athletic director) John Currie came to talk to me five years ago and he said, ‘Listen, Steve, you’re going to win thirteen ACC games, you’re going to win ten ACC games, and you’re going to win eleven ACC games and not make it to the tournament,’ I had said, I had to turn around and go home,” Forbes said. “I mean, really?”

And there are plenty of other examples. Syracuse, now in its second year behind Jim Boeheim, doesn’t have the hurdle of doing away with four decades of zone defense — and Adrian Autry already won 20 games in his debut season, the first time the Orange overcame that barrier since 2019. He returns a five-star talent as guard JJ Starling, added the program’s first top-20 recruit (Donnie Freeman) since Michael Carter-Williams and added much-needed frontcourt reinforcements through the transfer portal.

Then there’s Georgia Tech, which returns three starters — including freshman forward Baye Ndongo — from Damon Stoudamire’s inaugural team, which sneakily defeated two of last season’s Elite Eight teams. No one expects the Yellow Jackets to suddenly become the machine they were in the early 2000s, but a top-eight finish in the league is definitely within reach, if not more.

“You’ve got Carolina, you’ve got Duke — you’ve got your mainstays,” Stoudamire said. “I get that, right? But when I think about Tech, if Tech is really good, that makes this league good.”

Notre Dame, which returns ACC Rookie of the Year Markus Burton, should be much improved in Micah Shrewsberry’s second campaign. NC State may not make it to the Final Four again, but Keatts used that momentum to the best of his ability this season, drawing the merits of his third straight NCAA Tournament team. (Without five wins in five days by a 10th-ranked team, that is.) Miami added top-10 recruit Jalil Bethea and (somehow) returned point guard Nijel Pack for his final season of college hoops and should look much more like his Elite. Eight/Final Four itself from 2022-23 then the injury-riddled, 15-17 mess of last season.

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This is projection, yes. Things go wrong, sometimes horribly. But the fact that this level of expectations is even reasonable this season — especially compared to the doom and gloom of the league’s post-pandemic situation — is encouraging, to say the least.

“I really believe,” Phillips added, “that the bottom tier of our league may not be as bad and in as tough a place as it has been in recent years.”

The ACC has been doing behind-the-scenes research this spring to put its teams in the best possible situation: addressing scheduling issues, meeting with measurement experts, etc. But in the end, none of that matters if the teams – especially the recent middle and those at lower levels – are not performing.

For the first time in several seasons, it’s reasonable to expect that this will be the case.

“I don’t know everyone’s team because it’s tough, everyone has new guys,” Forbes said, “but our league is pretty good.”

(Top photo of Pat Kelsey: Jim Dedmon / Imagn Images)