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No longer ‘The Greatest,’ ACC basketball has fallen victim to finances, expansion and its own bad decisions
Muhammad Ali continued to refer to himself as “The Greatest” long after he wasn’t great anymore.
It’s the same delusion under which the ACC is currently operating when it tries to pass itself off as “the premier conference in college basketball.”
Which it does.
Often.
That was once the case. Stocked with heavyweights on the court and coaching on the sidelines, the conference sent at least 1 team to the Final Four every year from 1988-2002 and produced 8 national champions in a 19-season stretch between 2001-19 (10 if you include current members Syracuse and Louisville, which were in the Big East at the time.)
That dominance is just a faded memory now.
A steady decline that began after the COVID-interrupted 2020 season has reached a historic new low this year. Other than Duke, which has maintained its familiar spot near the top of the national polls and Louisville, revived under first-year coach Pat Kelsey, the drop-off has been monumental.
With just over a month remaining in the season, 8 of the league’s 18 members have losing records and are ranked 111th or worse in the NCAA’s NET rankings. The conference went 2-14 in the ACC/SEC Challenge and its overall nonconference winning percentage of .652 (129-69) is its worst since 1968-69.
Like Ali, some of the ACC’s decline can be traced to the inevitable passage of time. As immortal as Coach K, Roy Williams, Jim Boeheim, Tony Bennett, Mike Brey and Jim Larrañaga might have seemed, they couldn’t go on forever.
And their departures have left a significant coaching vacuum throughout the league.
You don’t lose Hall of Famers and coaching legends who have won more games than anyone in their schools’ histories without expecting at least some drop-off. But the void has grown even larger because of the hires made to replace them.
Rather than seeking out the best, most experienced candidates, Duke, North Carolina and Syracuse all chose to “stay within the family” by hiring former star players with no previous head coaching experience. Louisville went in the same direction after firing Chris Mack in 2022 in the wake of an NCAA investigation into alleged rules violations.
Of the on-the-job-training gambles, only the Blue Devils’ Jon Scheyer appears to have paid off.
While Hubert Davis has taken the Tar Heels to a Final Four and won an ACC regular season title, he’s in serious danger of missing the NCAA Tournament for the second time in 3 years. Syracuse is 9-11 in Year 2 under Adrian Autry and Kenny Payne was let go after winning only 12 games in his 2 campaigns with the Cardinals.
Besides Davis, only 1 other current ACC coach has taken a team to the Final Four. And it took a miracle for Kevin Keatts to get NC State there a year ago.
As much of a contributing factor as coaching has been, it’s far from the only reason the ACC has fallen from the top of the basketball food chain.
The significant revenue gap that exists between the ACC and its top rivals has also hurt the quality of play. So has a product watered down by expansion and the emphasis that’s been placed on football as the financial engine that drives college sports in the NIL era.
Those banners that hang from the rafters at Cameron Indoor Stadium, Smith Center, John Paul Jones Arena and other venues around the league no longer hold the same value to today’s athletes as they do to the alumni writing the checks and cheering them on.
Now that it’s legal, many of the top recruits and transfers are going to the highest bidder rather than schools with the most recognizable brand. (Though, in fairness, Duke signed the No. 1 class in 2024 and again leads the way in 2025.)
It would have been inconceivable as recently as a few years ago for the nation’s No. 1 prospect to choose BYU over blue bloods UNC and Kansas. But that’s what AJ Dybantsa did, thanks to an NIL deal believed to be worth somewhere in the range of $5-7 million.
Simply being North Carolina, Louisville or Syracuse isn’t good enough to automatically attract the best players anymore. That’s a reality at least one of those programs has come to accept.
There’s a reason Duke has 3 likely first-round NBA Draft picks on its roster while the rest of the ACC has 1, at best. And that one, Maxime Raynaud, was inherited when Stanford was absorbed after the demise of the Pac-12.
It’s because everyone else in the league has either been priced out of the market or in the case of the Blue Devils’ rival in Chapel Hill, has been slow to embrace the financial commitment necessary to compete at the highest level.
“Carolina is Carolina. The foundation of this place will never change,” UNC’s Davis defiantly proclaimed before the season. “This is not a transactional program.”
That’s an admirable stance to take. And credit Davis for still recruiting high school talent at a relatively high level. UNC signed the No. 8 class last year — headlined by 5-star Ian Jackson — and just landed the 5-star power forward Caleb Wilson in the 2025 cycle.
But by planting a flag on that moral high ground, whether out of arrogance or ignorance of the changing landscape around him, Davis set the wheels in motion for his team’s current struggles.
He did so by reportedly turning away at least one potential transfer who could have helped address the Tar Heels’ glaring lack of a dominant low post presence because of the player’s financial demands.
Adapt or get left behind.
The results speak for themselves.
Award-winning columnist Brett Friedlander has covered the ACC and college basketball since the 1980s.