ACC basketball aims to fix image, change narrative — whether it should have to or not

Toward the end of each of the past three men’s college basketball seasons, the ACC has experienced something of a collective catharsis. It has become routine over the past few years, a budding tradition in a sport that has found itself fighting for sustained relevancy in a college athletics world more and more driven by football.

By now, everyone knows the deal: ACC men’s basketball teams might spend parts of November and December finding themselves, at best, or languishing at worst. Throughout January and February, the conference — hurt by metrics that may or may not overvalue nonconference performance of the previous months — will take a beating nationally.

The perception of ACC basketball will sink. The pundits will mock, or question the strength of the conference. Fans of rival conferences will have a lot of fun delighting in the ACC’s perceived plight. The experts, some of whom work for an alleged ACC business partner (ESPN, if that’s not obvious enough) will project a laughably low number of conference teams who might be in a position to earn an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament (Exhibit A: the enduring talk last season that the ACC might be a two- or three-bid league).

And then March will come around, and the NCAA Tournament. And along with it, the catharsis. The last laugh, of sorts. The Great ACC Redemption. It has played out that way in each of the past three years, with the conference earning a measly four at-large bids (five bids total, including the tournament champion), only to out-perform its metrics and prove itself — again, and again — on the sport’s brightest stage.

Thing is, as much as the league’s coaches and administrators have enjoyed proving everybody wrong every postseason — and it has brought a lot of quiet satisfaction around the old league headquarters in Greensboro, and now Charlotte — they’re tired of doing it this way. Tired, especially, of fighting the perception, however founded or not, that ACC basketball just isn’t what it used to be.

It might not be, to be clear. There’s no denying college basketball as a whole isn’t what it used to be. Still, conference commissioner Jim Phillips said in Charlotte on Wednesday at the ACC’s annual preseason media tipoff event, “From top to bottom, this league has been undervalued.”

Success in March Madness, but ...

It’s difficult to argue, given that the conference everyone loves to drag from December through February has developed quite a knack — or, well, continued it — for excelling in March and early April.

A season ago, the ACC accounted for a quarter of the Sweet 16. Not bad for a league that at one point wasn’t supposed to even get that many teams into the entire tournament. N.C. State and Duke played a memorable — and highly-rated — game in the Elite Eight, with the Wolfpack advancing to the Final Four for the first time since 1983. The season before last, in 2023, Miami rose from the ashes of months of anti-ACC propaganda and reached the Final Four; and the season before that, North Carolina and Duke met in that epic national semifinal in New Orleans.

Somehow, the world didn’t even end that night, even if Mike Krzyzewski’s coaching career did.

To believe the many critics in recent years, the ACC’s reign as the nation’s best basketball conference is also over. And there’s no doubt, it should be noted, that the conference’s football-driven expansion has eroded a lot of what made it special, as a basketball conference. The double-round robin in the regular season is long gone. The sense of local familiarity, and that weird mix of congeniality blended with heated hostility, doesn’t really exist outside of Tobacco Road.

ACC basketball loyalists still yearn for the past because the past was that good. The supposed glory days are long gone, the once-tight geographical confines of the conference now stretching to the Northeast and North Texas and all the way to the Bay Area of California (not exactly Tobacco Road out there, but we hear it’s good wine country). Indeed, the conference isn’t what it was but it’s still as good as any college basketball league in the country, especially at the top.

The results from the past few NCAA Tournaments have proven that much.

... Poor perception: ‘We have to fix it’

Back in July, at the football version of this same conference event, Phillips adopted an unusually aggressive and outspoken stance to defend a league that’s been in turmoil. The Florida State and Clemson lawsuits, with both schools seeking an escape from the ACC’s Grant of Rights, are a big part of that turmoil. So, too, though, is the war of perception the conference long avoided, but is now waging. Phillips continued with that air of strength Wednesday.

There was his commentary on the league being “undervalued” in men’s basketball.

“I know you don’t get credit for past successes,” Phillips said a little later. “I get it. I totally get it. But we just feel like the last three years with five invitations, each of those five years, is not reflective of the basketball that’s being played in this league, the coaches that are in this league, the student-athletes and players that are in this league that are matriculating into the NBA and all the rest of it from a players’ standpoint.”

Phillips paused momentarily and said: “We have to fix it.”

Moving the ACC forward

To that end, the conference underwent a basketball autopsy after last season. The league hired consultants and analysts and during its annual spring meetings even invited Joe Lunardi — the ESPN NCAA Tournament “bracketologist” who has been an outspoken critic of the ACC the past few seasons — to explain to coaches why the conference has faced such a perception problem. Inviting Lunardi was not necessarily popular among all coaches but, still, it spoke to the league’s attempt to address the narrative and change it.

As Phillips described it Wednesday, “We did a complete kind of rebuild (to) look at this thing objectively.” He said he provided a warning to some of the conference’s coaches, especially ones whose teams could schedule more difficult tests during the non-conference portion of the season: “Don’t be sensitive about it,” Phillips said.

“Coaches, don’t be sensitive if we call you out on schedule and some of those things.”

Diagnosing the ACC’s problem the past few seasons doesn’t necessarily take a bracketologist or any other type of -ologist. It’s not all that complicated: League teams, especially those beyond the best four or five, have struggled against non-conference opponents. And as Phillips put it, “We’ve had a drag at the bottom” of the league, with a bad (or worse) few teams — like, say, Louisville a season ago — affecting the reputation of the rest of the conference.

Another round of expansion, then, isn’t exactly what the doctor ordered. Stanford has had some success in men’s basketball, but not all that recently. Cal has made the NCAA Tournament once in the past 10 years, and not since 2016. SMU has made the tournament twice in the past 30 years. None of those teams figure to be the disaster that Louisville was last season but, still: The new arrivals are likely going to further dilute a product that’s already been diluted.

Still, that’s college basketball these days, too. The Big East has admirably rebuilt itself but is hardly the Big East of its heyday. The Big 12 has become a metrics darling led by a carnival barker in Brett Yormark and, to be sure, there’s some admirable basketball being played there but maybe not as admirable as its schools’ ability to juice the NET rankings in their favor. The SEC, meanwhile, has awoken in recent years to realize that basketball is indeed a thing, and a worthy endeavor.

In a perception sense, the ACC has ceded its place as the dominant force in the sport. In reality, though, maybe it never did. The word Phillips kept repeating Wednesday was “premiere” — as in the ACC remained the nation’s premiere basketball conference. It has made the case again and again in March and early April.

It wouldn’t hurt for that to happen in November and December, too.