The biggest issue facing the ACC may be championships. And not just winning them
Jai Lucas was already working through the new experience of putting together his first schedule as the new head coach at Miami when the ACC announced, last week, it would go from 20 conference games to 18 in men’s basketball.
Lucas said he figures to use one as a regular “buy,” game, paying a lesser opponent to come to Coral Gables, and may try to do a neutral-site game or home-and-home with a power conference opponent with the other. In both cases, he discovered he wasn’t the only one reaching out.
“When they changed the rule, they had the other 17 schools trying to get to some of those teams, making the same phone calls,” Lucas said. “Prices went up.”
Another of the ACC’s new coaches, N.C. State’s Will Wade, is waiting to finalize his schedule until he has a sense of how good he thinks his team will be, with the potential to still add anywhere from four to six players to a transfer-heavy roster.
“Once we finish the roster off, we’ve got three or four more games to finish,” Wade said. “And how we finish the roster off will determine how we finish off our scheduling.”
The sudden availability of two nonconference opportunities in basketball is a direct reaction to the past three NCAA tournaments, when the ACC only got a total of 14 teams into the field in those years despite sending a team to the Final Four in all three. The ACC’s last national title was in 2019, a year in which the league claimed three of the four No. 1 seeds, only the second time any conference had done that.
A similar conversation is happening in football, where the SEC and Big Ten are agitating for four automatic berths — each! — in an expanded 16-team CFP bracket, trying to bully their way to better odds. The ACC’s representatives in the first 12-team field, Clemson and SMU, were both eliminated before Christmas, and the ACC hasn’t won a national title in football since 2018 or been in the title game since 2019.
This is the ACC’s longest title drought in those two important sports since the 1990s, between UNC’s 1993 basketball title and Florida State winning the football title in 1999.
In both critical revenue-generating sports, the ACC has been increasingly squeezed out of the postseason, with consequences that continue to reverberate, and if there was one creeping, shared realization at an otherwise calm three days at Amelia Island — certainly compared to recent years — it was that the league, collectively, has to do something about it.
“I’m restless,” ACC commissioner Jim Phillips said. “I’m restless with holding that ultimate prize because we’ve done it so often prior, and that continues to be a point of priority for myself and the league. There’s not many meetings that go by that we don’t talk about that, because of this history we’ve had. Over the last period of time, we just haven’t reached that mountaintop as often as we have in the past.”
Championships matter
Being more nationally competitive is an existential matter for the ACC, because championships matter, perhaps above everything else. You can’t win them if you don’t get the chance, and as Miami and N.C. State proved in men’s basketball, the more chances the better. And as many titles as the ACC wins in other sports, those two are going to drive the next television deal as much as anything, and that next TV deal is going to determine the future of the ACC itself.
In men’s basketball, that meant dropping two league games, ostensibly to allow teams to be more aggressive with their nonconference scheduling, but the subtext was also “fewer games against bad ACC teams,” a concession to the way a rotating collection of programs has scraped the bottom of the barrel lately — to the point where Cal, Stanford and SMU walked in the door and finished ahead of two programs that had been to the Final Four in the previous two years, Miami and N.C. State.
In theory, there’s a simple solution to this: Win more nonconference games and the ACC’s base NET rating will go into the conference season higher, so ACC conference games will be worth more. That’s been the ACC’s biggest issue the past few years; Wake Forest coach Steve Forbes said he’s had six Quadrant 1 home games in four years at Wake; Mississippi State played seven last season alone. Is that unfair? The ACC’s 2-14 record in the ACC-SEC Challenge makes it a hard point to argue.
“It’s just not reflective of who this league has been,” Phillips said.
The ACC dealt with a troubling men’s basketball dip a decade ago when, in between Duke’s 2010 and 2015 NCAA championships, no league teams made the Final Four. Of course, the league has bounced back nicely, with an ACC team appearing in eight of 10 since.
Keeping that success alive becomes increasingly difficult as fewer ACC teams make the field, though.
Perhaps no one around the ACC knows the underlying math better than North Carolina athletic director Bubba Cunninhgam, who just finished his term on the NCAA selection committee, serving as chairman the past season. He said North Carolina will use the additional games to play seven nonconference home games this year, up from five a year ago, but that improving scheduling is a league-wide lift.
“I do think, as a league collectively, we need to win more games,” Cunningham said. “So having two more games on your schedule should help significantly. … The NET is significantly driven by those nonconference games, so the more you can win as a league, not just any one school, all of them, the better off you’ll be.”
At least the NCAA basketball tournament is an open book. There’s not a lot of confusion over what the ACC has to do to get more teams into the field, even if there’s a lot of discussion over how best to do it. Football is a completely different story.
Entitlement vs. achievement in the CFP
The CFP steering committee has been debating an expansion to 16 teams since before the playoff even expanded to 12, and the SEC and Big Ten haven’t been shy about throwing their weight around, demanding multiple automatic qualifiers as a pure power play, attempting to substitute entitlement for achievement.
CFP executive director Richard Clark spoke with ACC football coaches on Tuesday, but the matter is largely out of their hands. The commissioners and presidents will decide who gets byes, who gets automatic bids, how much conference championships should matter and who hosts going forward.
Phillips more or less declined questions about future formats out of respect for the process, but did say “I remain steadfast about fairness in the system and access, regardless of the model.”
The commissioner’s unwillingness to speak publicly about it is an indication of how the line he’s treading is very fine, and how politically fraught his position is. The ACC can’t exert as much influence as its deeper-pocketed peers, but it also can’t acquiesce to a format that dooms it to football irrelevance by accepting three ‘AQs’ when other conferences get four, without a single game being played.
Otherwise, why even bother playing the games?
“I don’t understand why there would be an AQ, other than the conference champions,” N.C. State coach Dave Doeren said. “To me, the four conference champions, or five if they want to include the Group of Five, however they want to to it, are in. And then they ought to take the rankings. And if you’re in the top 14 or 15 or 16, then you’re in. I thought the point was to reward the guys that had the best seasons?”
If the CFP omitting undefeated, ACC champion Florida State from the four-team field in 2023 because of a quarterback injury was bad, imagine, for a moment, a football season where four ACC teams win 10 games, only losing to each other. Then only three get into a 16-team field, while 8-4 Iowa and 7-5 Missouri each claim the fourth automatic spot allocated to their conferences.
Second-class status would be an abject disaster for the ACC, which may not always have more than three teams worthy of inclusion — and scraped to get two teams into a 12-team field last year — but can’t close the door on the possibility.
Next moves for the ACC
There have been some damp-squib discussions about having the second- and third-place teams play in the ACC championship game instead and other contrivances to maximize the ACC’s chances of getting more teams into the CFP, but unlike basketball, it’s less about what the ACC does internally than what the CFP does externally.
“I don’t know if you can go down any road until you have finality about what the model looks like,” Phillips said.
In basketball, at least, the solution is simple.
“You have to have some games that give you the opportunity, if you end up on the bubble or something, to be able to get into the tournament,” Lucas said.
The former Duke assistant might not get there in his first year at Miami. But everyone, at all 18 schools, has to be thinking about it. It’s more important than it ever has been.
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This story was originally published May 14, 2025 at 11:50 AM with the headline "The biggest issue facing the ACC may be championships. And not just winning them."
