ACC people are mad. You can understand why.
This is a proud basketball conference. It boasts real culture, devoted lifelong die-hards, and not one but two of the sport’s bluebloods. It has become accustomed, down the generations, to being seen as the best league in the sport, or close to it, every single year. Dips are rare and temporary.
Except the ACC’s current dip keeps getting longer. In 2013-14, after it lost Maryland to the Big Ten and added Rick Pitino-era Louisville, the league ranked third in KenPom.com’s conference rankings (which rank per the adjusted efficiency margin of a team that’s expected to go .500 in conference play). It was No. 2 for the next three seasons, third in 2018-19 when Virginia won the national title (and Zion Williamson played in the conference, lest we forget how good that dude was as a college freshman) and fourth in the abandoned 2020 season.
In 2020-21, it was fifth. But that was the bubble year; that season was weird. Duke, unthinkably, went 13-11. You could ignore it, and that low conference ranking … except that it happened again in 2021-22, even as the ACC sent two teams to the Final Four. Then, in 2022-23, the ACC ranked seventh — behind both the Pac-12 and the Mountain West. In each of the past two seasons, the 15-team power conference sent just five teams to the NCAA Tournament, more than half of those bids arriving narrowly via the bubble.
The broader data trends suggest the ACC has not been itself the past few seasons. Not bad! Just not great. This is not just down to Ken’s AdjEM ratings, either. Indeed, pretty much any statistical system that quantifies college basketball — down to the freaking super-simple long-retired no-margin-of-victory who-did-you-beat-where RPI, more on this below — agrees the ACC has not been as good as usual relative to its power conference peers the past few seasons.
It is OK to say this. It is provable and evident. And yet ACC fans — and also coaches and Twitter users — have pushed back on this idea harder than ever this season. It’s been bewildering, actually, the force of this belief. There’s something happening there that goes beyond assessments of the league’s basketball offering, something deeper.
Two things are true, no matter what happens in the sport this weekend, whether Wake Forest beats Duke today or not: ACC fans are making a difficult uphill argument about the strength of their league relative to competitors this season. But, more than that, they shouldn’t be making any argument at all.
Guys, it’s 2024. The conference doesn’t love you back.
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