This season, the Atlantic Coast Conference has been one big boxing match. Each team throwing right hooks, left jabs, and clean body shots, but no one delivering the uppercut knockout blow.
“Frankly, I think the league is in a very similar place to last year,” college basketball broadcaster Evan Lepler said. “It’s not getting very much credit nationally and there are certainly plenty of reasons for the league to not get a ton of credit with the teams that are ranked so poorly and the non-conference performance that was mediocre to average at best.”
In past years, the ACC blue bloods – Duke and North Carolina – raised the heavyweight belt and helped elevate the legitimacy of the conference. That’s not the case this year with the Blue Devils (17-8, 8-6 ACC) and Tar Heels (16-10, 8-7) in the middle of the pack in the ACC.
“They’ve obviously both had coaching transitions,” Lepler said. “And as much as we want to think of Hubert Davis as just carrying over what Roy Williams did and Jon Scheyer and Coach K (Mike Krzyzewski), there’s going to be an adjustment there. I think in the past the league almost counted on Duke and Carolina to register these big non-conference wins that inflated the perception of the league.”
And those impactful out of conference wins haven’t been there for either team. Duke has losses to Kansas (Big 12) and Purdue (Big 10) while UNC fell to Iowa State (Big 10), Alabama (SEC) and Indiana (Big 10).
Currently, #7 Virginia (19-4) and unranked Pittsburgh (18-7) are tied for the top spot in the conference at 11-3, while 15th ranked Miami (21-5, 12-4 ACC) has 12 wins, as of last night. Right below them is Clemson (18-7, 10-4 ACC) and #23 NC State (20-6, 10-5). Despite that, a third of the conference is well below .500.
The ACC is the 7th best conference according to the Kenpom Rankings which takes into account a slew of different offensive and defensive numbers.
“I think the league gets a bad rap because of the circumstances of Louisville and Notre Dame and Georgia Tech and Florida State and Boston College,” Lepler said. “Look, when a third of your league is ranked 150th or worse and you’re a power conference, that’s not going to look good, and it’s reflected in the metrics.”
Despite the lower-than-normal ranking, ESPN’s Bracketologist Joe Lunardi has seven ACC teams making the NCAA Tournament, tied for the second most of any conference. The teams are North Carolina (11), Duke (9), Clemson (11), Miami (5), Virginia (3), Pittsburgh (9), and NC State (8). And let’s remember, the ACC had five teams make the tournament last year and three of them appeared in the Elite Eight.
“The ACC has like six teams that are going to be somewhere between seven, eight, nine, ten seeds in the tournament and if I was a one or two seed, I wouldn’t want to play those seven, eight, nine, ten seeds in a second-round tournament game,” Lepler said. March may not always be the best indicator of how a league ranks but it’s also hard to ignore what the ACC did last March and what I feel pretty confident the ACC will do this March.”
With the ACC Tournament about three weeks away, the question becomes which team will have its gloves raised to the roof and be crowned champion of the ACC?