For the third season in a row, ACC basketball is off to a struggling start

Tony Bennett did a good thing and got slapped in the face for it. The Virginia coach was willing to go the extra hour to play on the road at James Madison and help a smaller in-state school open a new arena. He was willing to delay a year so JMU could actually have fans in the building.

And naturally, Virginia lost Tuesday night, 52-49, because that’s the kind of year it’s been for Virginia and the rest of the ACC. No good deed goes unpunished and no ACC team has an unblemished record.

Only No. 3 Duke is in the top 25 and appears, at this point, to be a legitimate Final Four contender, and even the Blue Devils couldn’t hold onto the top spot for longer than a week. Only North Carolina even got another vote in this week’s poll. At the moment, it’s lonely at the top.

Virginia was coming off an improbable last-second home win over Pittsburgh, which threatens to be one of the worst ACC teams in recent memory. ACC teams have lost not only to James Madison but Furman and Navy and Colgate and UMBC (not Virginia this time!) and The Citadel and Rhode Island (twice).

All of which raises two questions: How bad, relatively speaking, is the ACC this season? And where does Pittsburgh rank among the ACC’s worst teams?

The news isn’t good for the ACC, but Pitt — at this point — is only very bad, not epically bad.

In terms of Ken Pomeroy’s efficiency ratings, which date back to the 2001-02 season, this is shaping up to be one of the worst ACC seasons of the past two decades. The lowest of the low points was 2013, when the ACC was the sixth-ranked conference behind even the Mountain West. That was in the heart of the ACC’s unprecedented four-year Final Four drought.

The ACC has finished fifth three times before, in 2009, 2012 and 2021. That’s where it sits now. Even with the lack of top teams — Duke stands very much alone — there’s enough heft in the middle with North Carolina, Virginia Tech, Florida State and Louisville to keep things from getting any worse.

But in a league that’s used to generating national champions — five of the past 12 — that’s not exactly where the bar has been historically set. After finishing second among conferences in 2018 and third among conferences in 2019 when Virginia won the national title, the ACC has been fourth, fifth and now sits fifth in the succeeding three seasons, and is coming off a dismal 4-7 performance in the NCAA tournament with no team seeded higher than fourth.

If things looked grim in 2020 before COVID hit, they look even worse now. That magical 2019 season, when Duke and North Carolina and Virginia were all No. 1 seeds, Zion Williamson captivated the sport and the Cavaliers bounced back from the UMBC debacle a year earlier to win it all, seems like a distant memory.

For the most part, the middle of the ACC is merely mediocre, not terrible, with 10 of the 15 teams in the top 60 despite the lack of a real rival to Duke. Then there’s the anchor, 2-6 Pitt, with wins over Towson and UNC Wilmington and losses to The Citadel and UMBC.

Given their almost total roster turnover and lack of early results, it feels like the Panthers are on the verge of a historically bad season. They’re on the verge … but they’re not there yet.

Only five ACC teams have ever finished out of the top 200 in the KenPom era. Pitt currently sits 196th, with some work to do to get all the way to the bottom. The worst ACC team of the KenPom era was Boston College in 2012, 261st but somehow 4-12 in the league and a useful distraction for 211th-ranked Wake Forest. That managed to break the all-time worst mark the Demon Deacons set a year earlier in Jeff Bzdelik’s first season, 259th.

To that point, no ACC team had ever finished worse than 110th. Those teams were truly trend-setters.

Two other teams have plumbed the depths of the 200s since, the two 0-18 teams generally considered the worst of the worst in modern ACC history: the Boston College team that in 2016 that became famous for Dennis Clifford deciding his favorite moment of the season was “Going out to eat” on its way to finishing 225th, and Kevin Stallings’ last Pittsburgh team two years later that ended up in the 227th spot. Marcus Carr, that team’s freshman star, is still playing at Texas.

So: Is the ACC as bad as it’s ever been? Not right now, but it’s close. Is Pittsburgh as bad as any ACC team has ever been? Actually no, and it’s not that close — but there’s a lot of basketball left.