ACC’s shaky nonconference showing creates NCAA bid drama as bulk of league play arrives

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — It’s still early for the Atlantic Coast Conference. No one knows that better than N.C. State coach Kevin Keatts, whose team last year found a never-before-seen form just in time to improbably win the league tournament and reach the Final Four.

That doesn’t change the fact this isn’t the place the ACC wanted to be as teams dive into the meat of the league schedule.

A season that began with the publicly stated goal of earning more NCAA Tournament bids — backed by the league continuing to outperform its peers in March Madness — instead had a jarring nonconference showing. That has brought the league into 2025 with just one AP Top 25 team, while others face the question of how much they can improve their standing in a league offering a limited universe of chances for high-end wins.

“At this point, you have to control what you can control,” Keatts said Friday, a day before his team faces rival North Carolina in a rematch of last year’s ACC final. “Most of the talking heads are going to have us with four (bids), maybe an outside chance for five. I just don’t think you can worry about it. I just think you’ve got to lock into your team and figure out how to win games.”

Indeed, though that’s how the trouble began.

Tough start

The ACC is 16-52 against the Big 12, Big East, Big Ten and Southeastern conferences as of Friday, a win rate of 23.5%, according to Sportradar. That’s by far the worst of those top leagues, led by the SEC (59-19, .756), then followed by the Big Ten (31-23, .574), Big East (18-23, .439) and Big 12 (21-28, .429).

The low point was the SEC’s 14-2 romp against the ACC in that annual interleague contest. The ACC’s wins were No. 4 Duke handing No. 2 Auburn its only loss in a March-worthy throwdown featuring preseason AP All-Americans Cooper Flagg (Duke) and Johni Broome (Auburn), and Clemson beating No. 6 Kentucky.

Multiple coaches on Monday’s league teleconference had no answer for why the league-wide results had been so shaky.

“I don’t know, I haven’t watched all the teams, I certainly haven’t seen a lot of the games,” Clemson coach Brad Brownell said. “We’re all a little disappointed with some of the results.”

And the impact lingers by establishing a pecking order when it comes to perceived league strength, particularly now as teams dive into conference play to continue building their resumes.

For example, the ACC had six teams in the top 50 of Friday’s NET rankings, the constantly shifting sorting tool used by the NCAA selection committee; that trailed the SEC (14), Big Ten (10) and Big 12 (nine). That could ultimately impact the committee’s decisions on everything from bubble teams on the fringes of the 68-team field, to seeding lines for top teams playing for the most favorable bracket path to San Antonio.

“Unfortunately, when results go that way, decisions are made for really the rest of the year,” Duke coach Jon Scheyer said. “And it’s unfortunate that it happened that way.”

Going forward

It’s an ill-timed stumble considering league coaches and officials had spent the offseason examining why the league has been getting its lowest bid totals since expanding to 12 teams and beyond. The league has managed just five bids for three straight seasons from its 15-team membership, which has expanded with this year’s additions of California, Stanford and SMU.

The ACC keeps winning in March, such as putting four different teams (Duke, UNC, Miami and N.C. State) in the past three Final Fours and six dating to 2015 with three national titles in that span. As longtime Florida State coach Leonard Hamilton put it Monday: “We always seem to be standing tall at the end of the season.”

But past tournament performance isn’t part of the bid evaluation. The goal was to bump up that bid haul through quality wins early in the season. That will be hard to do now considering how things went in November and December.

Where things stand

Fourth-ranked Duke (13-2, 5-0) looks every bit like the team picked as preseason ACC favorite. That includes Tuesday’s 31-point win against Pittsburgh, with Panthers coach Jeff Capel pointing to Flagg’s hyper-competitive edge as a key.

“In my opinion, that’s what makes this Duke team different from last year’s,” Capel said afterward, “because when your best player’s like that, it kind of permeates through the whole team.”

Pitt (No. 20 in NET), UNC (39th), Louisville under first-year coach Pat Kelsey (40th) and Clemson (41st) are best positioned from there. That group secured quality nonconference wins against AP No. 21 West Virginia ( Louisville and Pitt ) and No. 22 UCLA ( UNC ) to go with Clemson’s Kentucky win, among others.

For everyone else, the reality is there aren’t as many Quadrant 1 wins that top an NCAA resume available to provide a boost. Instead, as Keatts noted, there’s “a bunch of Quad 2s, especially at home.”

The only thing to do now is win games, then hope those wins hold up well enough on Selection Sunday.

“When you don’t win those (ACC-SEC Challenge) games that are already scheduled and then you go outside and play some more nonconference games, and we have some ups and downs, it really hurts,” Keatts said.

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