This is Better Know a Conference, Buzzer’s annual preview series. Between now and Nov. 2, we’ll be writing the detailed stories — a mix of roster breakdowns and overarching narratives, divided into silly tiers — of the 2026-27 season to come.
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Today: The ACC, which last season exited a half-decade of depressing cultural and basketball drift, landed eight teams in the NCAA Tournament, and will look to continue its reputational rehabilitation in 2026-27. Let’s dig in:
The “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” tier
Duke Blue Devils
More precisely: winning in April.
This Duke team is going to win plenty before then, of course. Jon Scheyer’s teams have done so relentlessly as a rule, particularly the past two years, when they cycled through Cooper Flagg and Cameron Boozer, compiled a combined record of 70-7 (!), and were twice among an elite handful of truly dominant teams in two of the most hierarchical college hoops pyramids ever.
Scheyer’s work has been so comprehensive, and his latest team is once again so thoroughly stacked, that it feels like everything that happens between now and the third week of March is kind of beside the point. The Blue Devils are neck and neck with Florida as the preseason national title favorite, which is the same thing we would have acknowledged even before it became clear 17-year-old freshman forward Joaquim Boumtje-Boumtje could do stuff like this right out of the gate:
In the summer, Boumtje-Boumtje was treated almost like a bonus. He was so young, he had two seasons before he could be draft eligible, maybe he would work in slowly and develop as a reserve this season, whatever. Nope! He looks like a skinnier, less physically developed, left-handed Cameron Boozer. Go figure.
It’s borderline unfair, because the rest of the roster was already elite. John Blackwell is going to have a huge season; he shot it so well on huge volume at Wisconsin last year, and you can bet his looks are going to get much cleaner in this Duke attack. Cayden Boozer’s promising freshman campaign was overshadowed by his brother’s (and that mistake against UConn). Cam Williams is one of the most talented prospects in the country, point guard Deron Rippey looks ready to contribute right away, and Bryson Howard would probably play big minutes at 99 percent of the other programs in Division I. Caleb Foster is still here! Patrick Ngongba might be the ACC player of the year! This is ridiculous!
Duke will be the best team in the ACC. Duke will probably be a No. 1 seed. Duke will win its first two or three NCAA Tournament games, probably mostly comfortably. And then Duke will arrive at the true heart of its season, the Elite Eight and beyond, where success will be determined in the matter of a few crucial possessions down the stretch.
That is the only remaining knock against Scheyer: His teams have not executed well in high-leverage moments in Elite Eight and Final Four games. Not even in the tournament, broadly; Scheyer doesn’t have the exact early-upset har-har reputation of Tony Bennett or Jay Wright or even Bill Self before him. It’s about the last few minutes of the last three games. That’s it.
It does not feel particularly fair to boil the success of an entire season to a couple of seconds in March or April — for the slimmest of margins, one bounce of the ball, to determine everything about what came before. Only one team can win. Crazy shit always happens. But those seconds, and what Duke does with them, are the only forecast really worth talking about. We’ll see.
The “no, really, the ACC has multiple Final Four-level teams now” tier
Louisville Cardinals
The question of whether former UNC captain and Chapel Hill Ben and Jerry’s franchisee Seth Trimble will play for Louisville this year is, predictably, no more settled than it was two months ago. Trimble was ruled eligible with a tranche of the five-in-five hopefuls for a while, then he wasn’t, and then, on Friday, got a new temporary restraining order from the Jefferson County Circuit Court saying he was in fact eligible again. The season starts in a couple of weeks. Totally normal stuff!
The good news, for Louisville, is that Trimble was merely the icing on the roster cake — a nice-to-have bonus after most of the real roster work was already done.
In Flory Bidunga, Pat Kelsey and his army of NIL donors made the biggest early splash in the 2026 portal. Bidunga was a one-man defensive wrecking crew at Kansas last season, one of the main reasons Bill Self’s defense held up through all the Darryn Peterson chaos. He is elite at the rim but can also stretch and zero out perimeter ballhandlers; he affects every possession one way or the other. He’s probably the best, or at least the most impactful, defender in the country. The massive sum Louisville paid for him — and the speed with which Bidunga announced his commitment in the spring — suggests that at some point in the winter Kelsey decided the Cardinals needed to massively up their defensive level and would pay whatever it took to do so.
Bidunga is a really good offensive player, too. His sophomore growth from a raw dunker to a patient post operator and kick-out passer was stark. He is a real go-to option now. He also pairs just about perfectly with Iowa transfer Alvaro Folgueiras, a legend of the Hawks’ Elite Eight run. Folgueiras is 6-foot-10, rebounded his own glass, finished efficiently around the rim, but also went 36-of-108 from 3, meaning he won’t overcrowd Bidunga on the block. (Bidunga, for all his strengths, doesn’t seem like a guy you’d necessarily want to use in a trendy two-center lineup; Kansas certainly did not.) Folgueiras lets you split the difference.
From there, Kelsey has assembled another impressive group of guards and wings, albeit with a bit less perimeter shooting than last season: Arkansas transfer Karter Knox, returner Adrian Wooley, Dayton’s De’Shayne Montgomery, maybe Trimble, and Oregon guard Jackson Shelstad.
Shelstad is a swing acquisition. Injury kept him off the floor last season, but in 2024-25 he was 37.9 percent from 3, with lots of those makes off the dribble. He wasn’t remotely an elite distributor in his first two seasons (more of a “everybody look out I’m gonna put my head down and score here” type of lead guard), though he did post a 31.6 assist rate in 12 games last season, which held up against quality opposition. He will have to do a lot of the latter at Louisville. There are so many mouths to feed.
Besides Kelsey’s ability to really elevate a group of talents — Louisville was never better than the sum of its considerable parts a year ago — that’s the only real concern here. A lot rides on Shelstad’s decision-making, and the backcourt feels a little imbalanced, or maybe just overfull. Knox has yet to live up to his potential, got benched at Arkansas last season, and John Calipari didn’t seem particularly desperate to retain him. He will want a big role as a junior, but what if Trimble is cleared? Trimble was on the floor for 35 minutes in Louisville’s exhibition win over Kansas Wednesday (despite some real struggles offensively). Knox played for 12 and had seven points on five shots. This is surely not the level of involvement he envisioned when he relocated in the spring.
Still, when “what if our $3 million fifth-year transfer gets eligible, what will we do then?!” is what counts as a concern, you’re in good shape. Kelsey has fully resurrected Louisville from the Kenny Payne ashes. It’s time to take the next step.
Virginia Cavaliers
Any nostalgic UVa fans concerned that the post-Tony Bennett era would swing too wildly in the opposite cultural direction — that their beloved anachronistic program would become just another halfway house cycling through mercenaries every offseason — must have felt a big wave of relief this spring. A year ago, Ryan Odom built a No. 3 seed from 13 new players. For his latest trick, he kept everybody around.
