Once again, North Carolina is standing up for the ACC’s honor in late March. And once again, the Tar Heels are not alone.
The ACC has long been the gold standard in March Madness. The league has the highest NCAA Tournament winning percentage (.655), total tourney wins (475) and years with a winning record in the tournament (42 of the 44 tournaments where multiple teams from a conference could get bids). This isn’t a relic of a bygone age—with current teams riding on the reputation built by Dean Smith, Coach K and Jimmy V. Over the last eight tournaments, the ACC has won at a .656 clip—one percentage point higher than its all-time record in the Big Dance, and ACC teams have won 99 games, 23 more than any other conference.
Still, with hours of airtime to fill, nothing seems to delight TV commentators and talking heads more than talking about how bad the ACC is. The league is down. The SEC, Big Ten, Big 12 and Big East are all better, and, with most of the other leagues adding high-profile members next year, the disparity is only going to get worse. The fact that Clemson and Florida State are suing to leave the league—despite not being the driving force behind the league’s NCAA Tournament dominance—further underscores the narrative. Bad league. Past its sell-by date. Yesterday’s news.
The last time the outcry against the ACC was this loud was two seasons ago, when a mere five ACC teams made the tournament. The Big Ten had nine. The Big 12, Big East and SEC all had more as well.
Once they started playing games in March, however, something unexpected—at least to the so-called experts—happened. The ACC kept winning. The league went 14-5 in the tournament, winning more games than any other conference. The SEC went 5-6 and finished play in the Elite Eight. The Big Ten went 9-9 and was gone by the Sweet 16. the Big East 7-6.
The ACC, meanwhile, made up half of the Final Four, with UNC and Duke stealing the show in New Orleans.
Fast forward two seasons, and the ACC is even more terrible, if that’s possible. The league only placed five teams in the tournament and one of them—Virginia—was eliminated in the First Four. Any bubble team—from Virginia Tech to Wake Forest to Syracuse to Pitt—was vetoed by the selection committee.
“Just personally, that just doesn’t make sense at all,” said UNC coach Hubert Davis, who beat Pitt in the ACC Tournament. “I don’t care what metric, whatever you look at. There’s no way that you can look at this game and look at Pitt and not say it’s definitively an NCAA Tournament team, and not just an NCAA Tournament team, a team that could go far in the tournament.”
Davis knows something about going far in the tournament. He led the Heels to the national championship game in 2022, his first year on the bench. Now he’s back and winning again.
The Big 12 and SEC each placed eight teams and raised concerns about how they’ll be able to get even more deserving teams in after next year’s expansion. The Big Ten had more teams than the ACC. So did the Mountain West. Those other four leagues have combined for 21 tournament losses. The ACC has one—Virginia’s First Four loss. The rest of the teams have gone 8-0 and make up a quarter of the Sweet 16.
Which brings us to Los Angeles, site of the West Regional. The Tar Heels, on the strength of winning that terrible league’s regular season, is the top seed and will face Alabama, one of two remaining SEC teams in the field. The winner will face the winner of Clemson-Arizona for a trip to the Final Four. With Duke and NC State on opposite sides of the South Region bracket, it’s possible that the only teams that will be able to knock off an ACC team once the tournament got fully underway will be another ACC team.
The game between the Crimson Tide and Tar Heels will match one of the most efficient offenses in the country—Alabama ranks No. 4—against one of the most efficient defenses—the Heels are No. 11. The game may come down to the other end of the floor. Alabama is middle of the pack on defense, while the Heels are a top 15 offense.
Of course, those are just numbers, which, like narratives, can sometimes be twisted to say whatever we want.
Luckily for UNC and its conference neighbors, they play the games. And we’ll get to see which leagues are really down.
