That an ACC team advanced to the Final Four of this season’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament is hardly man-bites-dog news. In seven of the past 10 tournaments, 20 of the past 30 and 34 of the past 50, at least one squad from the league has reached the national semifinals.
N.C. State is the sixth different ACC school to compete on the sport’s ultimate stage since 2016, joining North Carolina, Duke, Syracuse, Virginia and Miami. Moreover, Clemson, Florida State, Louisville and Notre Dame have made the Elite Eight during that span, making 10 of the conference’s 15 programs that have played in a regional final in the last eight tournaments — the 2020 event was canceled at the pandemic’s onset.
“To me, the most critical piece is our schools are prepared for the NCAA tournament because of the conference they play in,” ACC commissioner Jim Phillips said in a phone interview Tuesday. “… The reality is, we’ve been undervalued, and we have to do something about that.”
The tournament selection committee has chosen five ACC teams each of the past three seasons, well below the league’s average and fewer than peers such as the Big Ten (23 bids), Big 12 (21) and SEC (22). Yet look at the conferences’ records in the past three NCAA tournaments.
The Big 12 is 29-20, the Big Ten 24-22 and the SEC 22-21. The ACC towers above them at 33-14, with only the 27-12 Big East in the same neighborhood.
The Mountain West, which has placed only one fewer team in the bracket than the ACC since 2022, is 9-14 in that stretch.
Phillips believes Pitt and Wake Forest this season and Clemson and North Carolina last year merited at-large NCAA bids, and other than Wake, each of those teams was among the last excluded from the field.
The ACC’s depth extends to the women’s bracket, too, where its 24 bids since 2022 pace the nation.
Five of its programs — Syracuse, Notre Dame, Louisville, Virginia Tech and N.C. State, the latter this year — have reached the Final Four since 2016. Plus, incoming ACC member Stanford has been to three Final Fours during that span and won the 2021 national championship.
Phillips has served on the men’s and women’s selection panels and said the entire process “needs a serious review, and I’ve talked to some committee members about it.”
He believes the NCAA should place greater emphasis on how teams perform late in the season — Pitt, for example, won 11 of its last 14 games this season — and less weight on the NET (NCAA Evaluation Tool) rankings, a metric that’s less flawed than its predecessor, the RPI (Rating Percentage Index).
“Analytics and metrics have a place,” Phillips said, “but it also warrants a discussion about whether past performance, and how conferences have fared in the NCAA tournament, should be considered.”
Since their votes are private, whether committee members weigh historical performance and league affiliation is unknown. But the NCAA’s selection principles clearly state that only the season at hand merits evaluation.
In a perfect world, that’s as it should be. But Final Four appearances by North Carolina, Duke, Miami and N.C. State in a three-year period of unusually low representation for the ACC do raise questions.
Searching for answers, Phillips has created an ACC subcommittee headed by North Carolina athletic director Bubba Cunningham and his Stanford colleague, Bernard Muir. Cunningham will chair the NCAA basketball panel next season, and Muir was chairman in 2019.
Phillips said the ACC subcommittee will consult with analytics experts to explore why the conference’s decline in bids coincides with the NET replacing the RPI as the NCAA’s base metric.
While not ready to advocate expanding the 68-team NCAA field, Phillips supports the ongoing studies to determine the wisdom and feasibility of such a step.
“How can you do it without undercutting what is the crown jewel of NCAA championships while still allowing access across the country?” he said.
Echoing his coaches, Phillips also said the ACC needs to consider returning to 18 league games, even as membership grows from 15 to 18 schools with the impending additions of Stanford, Cal and Southern Methodist.
For 2025-26, the ACC needs to convince television partner ESPN, which negotiated the change from 18 to 20 men’s league games in 2019 to create more inventory for the ACC Network, to reconsider. There are three selling points:
As the NCAA selection committee continues to emphasize nonconference results, ACC programs need greater scheduling flexibility.
An 18-game schedule with 18 teams would equate to 162 league contests, more than the current 150 for 20 games and 15 teams.
As the women’s model shows, an 18-game schedule for 18 schools is blissfully simple and balanced. You play one primary rival twice annually and everyone else once.
Men’s basketball could replicate the women’s designated rivalries: Virginia Tech-Virginia, Duke-North Carolina, Wake Forest-N.C. State, Florida State-Miami, Clemson-Georgia Tech, Syracuse-Boston College, Cal-Stanford, Notre Dame-Louisville and Pitt-SMU.
The ACC also has the satisfaction of finishing 12-3 vs. the Big 12, acclaimed college basketball’s premier league throughout the season, a record that includes 3-0 in the NCAA tournament.
“Our conference’s strong performance this year confirms what we’ve been saying all along,” Phillips said. “We’re the standard of college basketball. … If you’re talking about success, and ultimately the success in March, the tournament, which is the highest (level), when we cross-pollenate (362 teams), we are the standard.”
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N.C. State’s Mohamed Diarra, left, DJ Horne and DJ Burns Jr. celebrate during their victory over Duke in Sunday’s South Region final that sent the Wolfpack to the Final Four for the fi rst time in 41 years. The ACC’s record in the past three NCAA tournaments in 33-14, far better than any other conference.