The Downest Year
ACC basketball is truly down bad, and I've got the NET to prove it
In my season preview post, I lampooned the fact that seemingly every year is a “down year” for the ACC. Even last year — another “down year” — the ACC had three Elite 8 teams and a Final Four team.
However, this year is proving to be a truly down year, not just by lofty ACC standards1, but by pretty much any Power 5 conference standard. Today, we’ll walk through:
Updated tiers (contenders, tournament teams, awful teams) from the preseason projections
NET ratings2 to show how far the ACC has fallen
Updated Tiers
Title Contenders
Updated: Duke
Preseason: Duke and UNC
Duke is 10-0 in the ACC, ranked third in the NET ratings and a clearcut favorite for a 1 seed. Cooper Flagg has lived up to the hype and their defense is smothering. As I pointed out in an earlier post, Duke is now the clear favorite to win the ACC (60%), and Duke is a popular betting pick to win the national title, too.
UNC has never put it together as RJ Davis has struggled (UNC fans can read a full Tar Heels breakdown here).
Tournament- (and Bubble-)Quality Teams
Updated: Clemson, Lville, UNC, Pitt, SMU, Stanford, Wake
Preseason: Wake, Clemson, Notre Dame, NC State, Lville, Miami
While Chase Hunter and Ian Schieffelin have led the way for Clemson, the Tigers have a deep, balanced team, with nearly five players averaging double figures.
Pat Kelsey has overcome a spate of injuries to resurrect Louisville. Duke, Clemson and Louisville share only two ACC losses between them, and my projection model gives a 98% chance that one of the three is the eventual ACC champ. Those three appear to be the only ACC teams safely in the NCAA tournament field, too.
UNC has racked up a ton of impressive losses, but those don’t count for much. With a NET of 41, UNC can make the field, but they need to add to their 1-8 Quad 13 record. Pitt won the crucial tilt against UNC earlier this week but are in a similar position (NET of 33, 1-5 in Quad 1 games). Ditto for SMU (42 NET, 0-4 Q1).
UNC, Pitt and SMU could play their way into the field, while Wake and Stanford have much more ground to make up.
Wake is going end the season with impressive ACC and overall win totals. My model projects them to have 14+ ACC wins, which would give them 22 overall. However, the Deacs resume has no substance, with a NET of 70 and a 1-6 Quad 1 record. Stanford likely won’t tally as many wins (projected at 11 ACC wins) to bolster a similar resume (68 NET, 2-4 Q1).
In the latest ESPN bracketology, the ACC is getting 5 bids, with two teams in the “Next Four Out” group.
The issue with the ACC is the few opportunities for resume-padding wins. About half of ACC road games qualify as Quad 1 games, while nearly every single Big 12, Big Ten and SEC road game qualifies. Only the Big East offers fewer Q1 opportunities.
Below, I compare the ACC’s current NET distribution to previous years and to the other Power conferences.
Not Worth Writing About
Current: Everyone else
Preseason: Everyone else
Despite the heading of this tier, I’ll spend some words on Miami and Virginia. Both had experienced, successful coaches depart in haste at the beginning of the season, and both have had the wheels come off in ACC play, with a combined 2-16 record.
It’s wild to think Miami made a Final Four just two years ago. While these successful programs risk sliding into irrelevance, they’re also weighing down the ACC’s metrics. Miami’s NET (245) is by far the worst in the P5 conferences, and the next worst is BC (225). Compare those to the worst NET ranking of the other P5 conferences: 90 (SEC), 99 (B10), 121 (B12) and 193 (BE).
Which brings me to…
NET Ratings: Proof of the ACC’s Downness
Depending on how you want to measure it, this season is either the worst or second worst top-to-bottom conference performance of the past five years. The chart below shows the conference’s NET ratings as of Jan. 30 of each year (more details in the footnotes4).
The top of the ACC (the bottom of the orange to the bottom of the blue) is roughly as good as it’s been in past years.
The middle of the ACC is the worst it’s ever been (median NET of 85), and the bottom of the ACC is the worst it’s ever been apart from 2023, when the conference was dragged down by a truly dreadful Louisville team (336 NET).
In the preseason post, I noted that the ACC’s NCAA tournament success has come from all three tiers of the conference: title contenders, a rotation of strong second tier teams, and a sprinkling of lower-seeded surprises.
This year, Duke is the lone title contender, and the conference will send only a handful of second tier teams to the tournament. Maybe a team like UNC could make (another) surprising run, but the other Power conferences figure to send near-record levels of strong bids.
The 2021-2025 window shown above misses some of the ACC’s strongest seasons, but even this year ranks as a down year even compared to the other lackluster ones. While the on-court basketball product is middling, this year feels particularly gruesome because the future prospects of the conference feel so shaky.
Legendary, cornerstone coaches are retiring in droves, squabbles over football money threaten to fracture the conference, and other conferences have mobilized to usurp the ACC’s crown of basketball preeminence.
When comparing this year’s NET ratings to the other Power 5 conferences, the weakness in the bottom half of the league is even more painfully evident.
The worst team in the SEC is roughly as good as the middle of the ACC, and the bottom fourth of the SEC is roughly as good as the top fourth of the ACC. That might be an unfair comparison, as the SEC is being touted as a historically good conference this year.
But the Big Ten (18 teams) and Big 12 (16 teams) stack up favorably to the ACC, especially in the bottom half of the leagues. Even the Big East has a favorable distribution, although there are only 11 Big East teams.
I believe a lot of this is self-reinforcing, as the ACC’s NET ratings are dragged down by low NETs at the bottom of the conference. In a future post, I’ll explore the “inertia” of NET ratings and how they change (or don’t) throughout the season.
As a reminder, the ACC was quite good (possibly historically good) from 2015-2019, including an average of 4 S16 teams, 2.4 E8 teams and a Final Four team each season, along with winning 3 of 5 national titles
As I describe more at the end of the post, I think the NET rating has some flaws. However, I’m supportive of a single quantitative metric to attempt to sort across the 360+ D1 teams. While I’m partial to KenPom and other ratings, I’m using NET for two reasons: 1) it’s the official metric used by the selection committee when comparing resumes, 2) I was able to more easily source historical NET data to make year-over-year comparisons
Quad 1 games mean facing an opponent ranked 1-30 NET at home, 1-50 NET at a neutral site or 1-75 NET on the road. Read more about the NET rating here
P25 stands for the 25th percentile, or the 5th ranked team this year (4/5th in earlier years). P75 stands for the 75th percentile, or the 14th ranked team this year (11/12th in earlier years). I use similar stack ranking when comparing to the other P5 conferences