ACC getting five teams into tournament should be motivation, not relief
You could hear the sigh of relief all the way from Greensb…Charlotte. It’s crazy how much the goalposts have shifted that getting five teams into the NCAA Tournament is an accomplishment for the ACC, and it took N.C. State making an unlikely title run to do even that.
But five is better than four, and the angst that would have been emanating from the ACC will now be coming from the Big East instead. And among those five, the ACC actually fared pretty well in a year when the NCAA selection committee seemed to give the benefit of the doubt to power conferences.
Virginia even being in the field is a gift in itself. There’s no question Pittsburgh was a more threatening opponent, but that’s not how the committee assesses teams. No one’s expecting the bust-prone Cavaliers to make it out of Dayton, but stranger things have happened.
North Carolina secured the final No. 1 seed despite the ACC Tournament loss to the Wolfpack and avoided CBS favorites Kentucky and Kansas in its path (although not Arizona or Michigan State). Clemson and N.C. State were fairly seeded, given their strengths and weaknesses. And Duke slipped from a No. 3 to No. 4, but has a relatively comfortable draw in Brooklyn — and feeling a little snubbed might motivate a Blue Devils team that’s looked somewhat less than the sum of its parts lately.
By seeding alone, the ACC is expected to have its fourth team in the Final Four in the past three years, and its ninth in the past nine Final Fours. It has two teams on a path to the Sweet 16, and two others nobody is going to want to play, and also Virginia. It has set itself up for its usual March-slash-April success, continuing to hope that quality outweighs quantity.
At the same time, this isn’t good enough. We’re only five years removed from the ACC having seven teams and three of the four No. 1 seeds. No amount of complaining about the NET or the “Big 12 gaming the system” — never mind N.C. State did essentially the same thing in 2019 and was left out with the highest NET ever, at least until Indiana State this year — will change the fact that the ACC needs to win more games and recruit better players.
If Pitt beats Missouri or Florida, the conversation is different. Wake Forest lost to Georgia, Utah and LSU. Syracuse lost to Tennessee and Gonzaga and played a garbage nonconference schedule otherwise that left it no room for error. You don’t have to play New Hampshire AND Canisius AND Niagara, even if there’s nothing you can do about Georgetown.
The ACC actually avoided most of the really bad losses that have dragged it down in the past. It just didn’t have enough good wins. The ACC’s 10 non-NCAA teams beat a total of six teams in the KenPom top 50. That hurts everyone. (And you can’t blame Louisville for all of that. Syracuse and Pittsburgh combined for none.)
Someday, the committee might abandon “quadrants” and its Rube Goldberg rank-and-vote system dating back to the days of pen and paper and the black box that is the NET and use an open-source resume metric to select at-large teams. (Imagine the excitement of a live bubble changing with every game.) If expansion to 80 teams — three more First Fours, at the Palestra, Cameron and Allen Fieldhouse — is the price to pay for that, so be it.
But even then, the name of the game won’t change.
Stop losing to bad teams. Beat more good ones.
When the ACC gets back to doing that — something it did, with stunning regularity for decades — then getting five teams into the NCAA Tournament will no longer feel like the accomplishment it did Sunday, especially when it felt like four were on the radar. The standard should always be higher than that.
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This story was originally published March 17, 2024 at 12:00 AM with the headline "ACC getting five teams into tournament should be motivation, not relief."
