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John Gasaway, ESPN Insider
We have had over a month to digest the information that the ACC will add Cal, Stanford and SMU as members starting in 2024-25. From the proverbial 30,000-foot perspective, the transfer seems a win-win for the faculties and for the convention.
After navigating a nerve-wracking month the place the Pac-12 had already imploded, Cal and Stanford managed to safe touchdown spots in a storied convention. As for SMU, it is fortunately returning to the highest tier of Division I, nearly 40 years after the NCAA slapped the Mustangs soccer program with the demise penalty.
For its half, the ACC is beefing up its membership in case, say, a Florida State, North Carolina and/or Clemson would possibly sometime determine to hunt greener pastures. (The entire above reportedly voted towards the enlargement.) The brand new members additionally add media markets within the Bay Space and Texas to the ACC footprint.
These could be basic concerns for any main convention. Moreover, with the Massive Ten and Massive 12 raiding the Pac-12 (and the SEC having already locked up Texas and Oklahoma), standing pat might have been the trail of higher threat for the ACC. Increasing was a logical transfer for the league.
And but, purely by way of the league’s males’s basketball applications, this specific enlargement brings some extent of threat.
Potential for a lopsided ACC
As foolhardy as it might appear, assume for the second that we will look one yr forward and know what the foremost conferences will seem like in 2024-25. What’s going to we see?
The previous Pac-12 has dispersed. UCLA, USC, Oregon and Washington are within the Massive Ten. Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah play within the Massive 12.
Cal and Stanford, together with SMU, are within the ACC. Whereas the Bears and Cardinal have nationwide championship banners (from 1959 and 1942, respectively) and the Mustangs reached a Closing 4 (in 1956), these peak performances date to the distant previous.
Extra just lately, the trio collectively has not received an NCAA event sport since 2014. Cal and SMU rank close to the underside of the nation’s (present or soon-to-be) main convention applications by way of efficiency over the previous 5 seasons. For that matter, present ACC members like Boston Faculty, Wake Forest, Pitt and Georgia Tech are in a lot the identical statistical boat.
Which implies in a yr’s time the ACC can have six members that, for now, rank among the many backside 12 nationally for efficiency over the previous 5 seasons.
Naturally, the previous 5 years cannot present an infallible map of the longer term. The previous 5 years do not even observe final season with unerring accuracy. Have a look at Pitt. Whereas the Panthers make our checklist for many extreme five-year struggles, that they had an important 2022-23, going 14-6 within the ACC and reaching the NCAA event for the primary time since 2016.
Maybe onetime Stanford star Mark Madsen can work comparable wonders at Cal, similar to onetime Duke star Jeff Capel did in Pittsburgh final season. Who is aware of?
What we will say within the current tense, nonetheless, is that the ACC did not get as a lot of a basketball elevate from this wave of enlargement as its rivals did. Once more efficiency over the previous 5 seasons, the ACC’s new arrivals recorded a mean adjusted effectivity margin of plus-5.58. That is a great deal weaker than what we see from soon-to-be newcomers to the Massive Ten (plus-14.71), the Massive 12 (plus-14.90) and the SEC (plus-17.58).
Lean instances and bubble worries
Simply 4 years in the past, the ACC was grasp of all it surveyed in males’s hoops. Virginia, North Carolina and Duke all earned No. 1 seeds on Choice Sunday 2019. Everybody was buzzing in regards to the Blue Devils’ sensational first-year star Zion Williamson. The Cavaliers received the nationwide title. Then the pandemic hit. Florida State was denied the prospect to comply with up on an excellent 26-5 common season. It is doable Chris Mack and the Louisville Cardinals would have written a really completely different story prior to now few seasons in the event that they’d received an NCAA event sport or two after going 15-5 in ACC play.
Virginia hasn’t received a sport within the discipline of 68 since reducing down the nets in 2019. Over the identical three-tournament stretch (2021 to 2023), the ACC hasn’t produced any No. 1 seeds, the league’s longest drought since 1988 to 1990.
North Carolina and Duke performed an exciting sport within the 2022 Closing 4, and the Tar Heels reached the nationwide title sport. After being ranked No. 1 within the ensuing preseason AP ballot, nonetheless, UNC did not land a spot within the 2023 event.
Mike Krzyzewski, Roy Williams, Jim Boeheim and Mike Brey are all retired. In maybe the unkindest numerical lower of all, the ACC completed the 2022-23 season ranked No. 7 nationally at KenPom, behind not solely the Massive 12, Massive Ten, Massive East, SEC and Pac-12 but additionally the Mountain West.
In fact, statistical outliers within the path of poor performances have an uncanny tendency to presage higher instances to come back. In the event you’re ACC commissioner Jim Phillips, the priority isn’t a lot that the storied ACC is one way or the other going to degrade right into a second-tier basketball convention. The hazards are as an alternative extra mundane but additionally extra urgent.
So long as the NCAA continues to pick the event discipline within the current method, for example, Phillips shall be appropriate to fret that ACC bubble groups are jeopardized by the prevalence of weak opponents within the convention. That is unlucky and most actually pointless (there are higher methods to pick the sector, and the NCAA will get there finally, it all the time does), nevertheless it’s additionally true that that is already the case with the 15-team ACC.
This specific concern shall be extra salient than ever with the additions of Cal, Stanford and SMU. Then once more if the ACC has secured some organizational peace of thoughts in these fraught instances of serial realignment, the bubble worries every March shall be nicely value it the remainder of the yr.
