Better Know a Conference: ACC (Part II)

Proud, beleaguered, defiant: Can the ACC thrive again?

Better Know a Conference is Buzzer’s league-by-league preview of the 2024-25 season, featuring Bubble Watch-length narrative looks at every team in every major league — and other miscellany and mid-majors along the way — in rough order of expected finish.

To read the full series (and start posting on the best college hoops comment section on the Internet!) consider becoming a paid subscriber today. Today: The ACC, Part II.

It is the mandate of the sportswriter not to root for players, coaches, teams or leagues. This idea has become less fashionable over time, less trusted. We at Buzzer still believe in it.

Maintaining remove isn't mere kayfabe, a ploy to trick readers into thinking you're authoritative, though that is important too. It also aids the process of analysis. It is easy to get sucked into fandom, to get backed into a tribal corner, to increasingly and unintentionally write from the perspective of a supporter. Before long, you find yourself firing off at the hip with emotion you barely recognize in yourself in the first place. As much as possible, at least in our experience, it is preferable to keep your weight back, knees bent, heels firmly planted on your skis.

Save this crucial exception: We really hope the ACC is good this year.

We're rooting for it. We're all in on it. We have no choice. We simply can't do another year like the one that led to this piece, from February, in the heart of Buzzer’s first Bubble Watch mania.

If the 2023-24 season had been the first like this, well, fine. But what made it so awful, such a horrible exercise in toxic discourse, were the years of narrative that preceded it. The ACC has disappointed in the regular season, particularly the nonconference portion, for years. It has overachieved (or just plain achieved, depending on your perspective) in the tournament just as long. Every January and February for the past half-decade the ACC and its fans have found a league they are proud of subject to questions about its strength, how many tournament bids it really deserves, what the metrics say and don’t. The response has been increasingly exasperated — to the point of otherwise savvy ACC fans outright dismissing not just the NET but the very use of advanced metrics at all.

This is not a healthy place for a league to be in. Every winter shouldn't be a referendum on the practice of analysis itself. In his recent ACC preview, Will Warren humorously laid out the "run of play" for the modern ACC through various predictable stages: disappointment in November and December, national criticism, regional media backlash, Big 12 Quad 4 opponent comparisons, constant online proxy fights, followed by inevitable NCAA Tournament dominance.

Will’s probably right, and it was very funny to read, but it was also kind of depressing. Can we switch it up? Can we not do this? Can the ACC just … have a normal year?

If the ACC is going to break out of its vicious cycle, the teams below have to surprise. That has been the main issue with the league lately — not elite talent at the top, but a soft jumble of mid- to low-standings programs that rank anywhere between 50th to 90th in national adjusted efficiency, and that end up bringing little to the evaluative table when ACC play begins in earnest. They beat up on each other to no purpose; they are each other’s communal at-large quicksand. It's hard to prove yourself a worthy tournament team when the only big wins you can get come against Duke and North Carolina, especially when the ACC now has so many teams, when schedules are so imbalanced.

In short: The whole league needs to be better.

If it is going to be, redemption may begin with a longtime national power gone dormant in Central New York.