Last year, NC State provided basketball fans with the Cinderella story of a generation. After entering as one of the bottom-dwelling teams in the conference, the Wolfpack won in front of a skeleton crew of fans on Tuesday’s opening day, then kept on winning. State won the ACC Tournament, then went on to the NCAA Final Four.
A year later, there’s a very good chance that, when the ACC Tournament tips off in Charlotte, NC State won’t be around to defend its title, because the Wolfpack wasn’t good enough.
For the first time in the 70-plus year history of the event, not every ACC team will be invited to play in the league’s jewel event. The league added three teams in the latest round of expansion and decided that 18 is just too many for the tournament to handle. So the bottom three teams will not get a shot at the ACC’s automatic bid to the NCAAs. Their season, essentially, ends at the close of the regular season.
At 2-16 in the league, it’s already been decided that there will be no March Madness for Miami. At 4-14 entering the final week of scheduled games, State and Boston College are also on pace to miss out. The Pack would need to win its final two games and hope for some tiebreaker luck with the crowd of six-win teams in order to make a trip to Charlotte.
“I think it should be 80-some teams in the NCAA tournament,” said State coach Kevin Keatts, the toast of last March. “So, I think everybody should go to the ACC tournament. But that decision is way above my head. I’ll leave that up to the decision makers.”
And those decision makers were not the people most affected. Keatts earned an automatic extension, and, if rumors are to be believed, survived an immanent firing by winning out at least year’s tourney.
“I don’t know where it came from,” he said of the new tournament format. “If it was voted by coaches, I don’t remember ever voting for it.”
It means that State will be the first defending conference champion to miss out on the chance to defend its title since South Carolina won in 1971, then left the conference entirely. Duke, who won in 2019, then didn’t play a game before the 2020 tournament was wiped out due to COVID, also deserves a mention. The Blue Devils also dropped out of the 2021 tournament after an outbreak, meaning they didn’t lose a tourney game until three years after winning their title.
State also becomes the first original ACC member to miss the conference tourney since Maryland sat out due to NCAA punishment in 1991. UNC, who missed the 1961 tournament for a similar reason, is the only other original team not to play in every year’s edition.
Louisville (2015), Syracuse (2016) and Georgia Tech (2020) are the only other ACC teams to miss a conference tournament. All three of those incidents were bans related to NCAA violations.
Barring a reconsideration by league brass, however, it will become a regular occurrence, and the defending champions will be among the pioneers of this new era.
Ironically, the same thing that could keep State out—expansion producing a super-sized league—is also an argument to include everyone. With 18 teams, the ACC is forced to play an unbalanced schedule, meaning that some of the teams that will be home next week could be better than the teams opening play in Charlotte, just the victims of unlucky scheduling.
“Here’s my argument,” Keatts said. “All schedules are not created equal. And if you look at our schedule compared to somebody else, you know, our strength of schedule may be tougher. And so now, do you weigh the schedules and say, ‘All right, well, this team played a way tougher ACC schedule than the other team, and they’re getting in?'”
State is currently ranked No. 70 in the nation in the strength of schedule metric used by the NET (the ranking tool used by the NCAA selection committee). That’s higher than three of the four teams the Wolfpack is battling for to get into the ACC tournament—Notre Dame, Cal and Boston College. Only Syracuse (No. 68) has played a tougher one among that grouping of teams.
“You play an unbalanced schedule,” Keatts said “and everybody can get in, but when you get in the tournament, it’s nothing unbalanced. The cream always rises to the top. And we were the cream at that point last season.”
“I would love for everybody to have a chance,” Keatts added. “If that was the case last year, there may not have been an NC State story.”
