As the ACC season begins in earnest, the league faces a collective problem of its own making.
When it comes to burnishing NCAA tournament selection profiles – and at the moment, the ACC would be lucky to get four teams into the tournament, tying its post-expansion low – there aren’t enough good wins to go around.
In the past, any sins committed during the nonconference schedule could often be absolved by a strong performance in ACC play against not only the handful of Final Four contenders the conference has traditionally generated but a strong middle that would end up sending six, seven, even nine teams to the NCAA tournament.
A few home wins and a road win here or there in January and February could turn a bubble team into an at-large lock. That was always the real power of the ACC, a rising tide that lifted all boats, and one of the reasons the ACC went from 18 to 20 conference games. Not only could ACC teams help each other get into the tournament, the gauntlet they ran prepared them for the rigors of the postseason.
Six or more ACC teams have made the tournament for seven straight years. It’ll take a miracle to extend that streak this season.
The ACC’s woes have been well documented this season, with only Duke a legitimate national-title or even Final Four contender and only North Carolina and Virginia Tech even sniffing the top 25. The top is weak, the middle is soft, the bottom too deep.
Projecting forward, the ACC has only one tournament lock and two likely probables: Duke, North Carolina and Virginia Tech. Clemson, Wake Forest and Louisville all have a shot and at least one is likely to make it, perhaps two, maybe all three. The rest of the ACC, including tournament stalwarts like Virginia and Syracuse, is swimming upstream.
That’s because of the way the NCAA assesses tournament resumes, putting games into four “quadrants” as a sorting tool. Quadrant 1 games are against teams ranked 1-30 in the NCAA’s NET rating at home and 1-75 on the road. Picking up some Q1 or even Q2 wins are the best way for a team with a marginal resume to improve it, and the ACC just doesn’t have many to offer.
As things stand – and the NET can be volatile – there are only two Quadrant 1 wins available at home: Duke and Virginia Tech. On the road, there are another five: North Carolina, Clemson, Wake Forest, Florida State and Louisville.
At the end of the 2019 season, when Virginia, Duke and North Carolina were all No. 1 seeds in the NCAA tournament, beating five different ACC teams would have counted as a Quadrant 1 win at home and eight on the road – more than half the league. The opportunities to win the kind of games the committee cares about were manifest. Duke played 15. Virginia 15. North Carolina 18. As things stand, Duke, 3-1 against Quadrant 1 so far this season, only has four left -- five, if it can reschedule its postponed game at Clemson.
Not only is it an issue that those opportunities are limited this year, there are so few of them that it becomes almost a zero-sum game. Someone’s good win is someone else’s missed opportunity.
So for Clemson, Louisville and Wake Forest, let alone Florida State and Miami, Syracuse and Virginia, there’s almost no wiggle room. They can’t afford any bad losses. They have very few opportunities to state their case to the NCAA that they’re more than what they’ve shown so far.
The ACC, so often more than the sum of its parts when it comes to tournament selection, just doesn’t have enough parts this year.
