Stanford-Cal in Charlotte?! Welcome to the new-look ACC. But Thursday will feel familiar
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2025 ACC Men’s Tournament
Follow all the action from the 2025 ACC Men’s Basketball Tournament in Charlotte, NC, with updated scores, standings, game recaps and analysis from the team of writers from the News & Observer, Charlotte Observer and The State.
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For many of us, the ACC Tournament is best represented by a teacher rolling in a television on a cart on a random Friday afternoon in March, allowing us the delicious pleasure of watching college basketball while at school.
The ACC back then was such a regional treasure with such a national reputation that it reached almost everywhere, like good barbecue or Dale Earnhardt.
That was not exactly the ACC Tournament that we saw Wednesday night in Charlotte.
Four teams played in the night session at Spectrum Center: Cal and Stanford (both 2,700 miles from Charlotte), SMU (1,000 miles away) and Syracuse (a mere 730 miles away). There wasn’t a Big Four school in sight.
And that’s the new-look ACC for you. May as well get used to it. Cal and Stanford’s campuses are only 47 miles apart in California, but they flew to the Queen City to play this one because that’s the way the college game is these days. The ACC is a coast-to-coast league, stretching across the country like Interstate 10, and something like that had to happen for the league to survive.
Incidentally, the game the two California schools played was a fine one, with seventh-seeded Stanford edging No. 15 seed Cal, 78-73, in a contest that was tied with 81 seconds to go and not decided until the final 10 seconds.
The Stanford tree was dancing and the fans in the building were into it. It was a little like if Clemson and South Carolina played a football bowl game in San Francisco — but it seemed to work.
“That was a rivalry game, obviously,” Stanford coach Kyle Smith said. “Very emotional, I think, for both teams.
“And you could feel how much both teams wanted to win.”
“We feel energized being in this conference,” Cal coach Mark Madsen said after the loss. “Is the travel hard? Absolutely. But to be able to play at this level of competition is such an opportunity for us.”
Madsen has two degrees from… you guessed it… Stanford.
Madsen’s team got 37 points from Andrej Stojakovic in the best individual performance of this tournament so far, albeit in a losing effort. The season before Stojakovic had played at… you guessed it… Stanford. Stojakovic’s 37 points were the most scored by any player in an ACC Tournament game since 2013.
“It’s the first time in 64 years that we go 3-0 against them,” Stanford star Maxime Raynaud said afterward.
Did any casual basketball fan in the Carolinas know that stat? Not likely. But the players on the court certainly did.
Cal, Stanford and SMU are all in their first year in the ACC and all are playing in their first ACC Tournament. They are part of an odd bottom half of the ACC bracket, where there isn’t a single former ACC Tournament champion left.
Third-seeded Clemson? No. Never won one, amazingly. Second-seeded Louisville? No. Anybody else? No. So some team will be playing for its first tourney championship Saturday night against somebody in the old guard — most likely against No. 1 seed Duke and Cooper Flagg, but possibly someone else.
Thursday will look more familiar to longtime ACC fans. No. 1 seed Duke plays Georgia Tech in the first quarterfinal at noon, and UNC plays Wake Forest in the second game at 2:30 p.m., which is more or less an elimination game for two bubble teams trying to make the NCAA Tournament. That’s followed by Stanford vs. Louisville and SMU against Clemson.
It’s been an unusual ACC Tournament so far, and a decent one. It’s about to get better.
This story was originally published March 13, 2025 at 5:15 AM.
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