Have you heard? ACC Basketball is so bad this year. It should be a 3 bid league. Its conference ranking looks more like a mid-major. It’s trash. It’s garbage.
Last year we heard the same narrative as the ACC went on to dominate the NCAA tournament with 3 Elite 8 teams, 2 Final Four teams, and the best record (14-5) of any conference in the tournament.
This year the lazy takes are even worse because they don’t match what has happened on the court.
The ACC has some warts. That is not a question. The bottom of the conference is atrocious. Louisville still has a NET in the 300s. Florida State, Georgia Tech, and Notre Dame are all 175+. That’s some serious dead weight that is pulling down the conference metrics.
With that out of the way, making sweeping generalizations on a 15-team league based on 4 teams with terrible computer metrics is simply not looking deep enough at the league.
I’m not saying the bottom-of-the-league results don’t count. They do, but there are enough other results that you can’t argue the league as a whole is in the bad shape some suggest.
Here is the reality…
The ACC went 108-52 OOC this year.
35% of those losses are just from Florida State and Louisville!
That means the rest of the league went 104-34 OOC. The OOC winning percentage goes from 67% to 75%
The Big 10 is ranked 2nd in the NET rankings, and most bracketologists have them as a 9-bid league.
Including the bottom of the ACC, the ACC won the ACC/Big 10 Challenge 8-6, and that was without 22-win NC State being in the challenge. The ACC and Big 10 have played 25 total games against each other, and the ACC has a 13-12 record against the Big 10.
If 25 games can’t tell you something about a league vs league nothing will.
Well the ACC can’t compete with the top teams in other leagues.
Baylor is 10-6 in the Big 12, and in the top 10. Virginia beat them.
Nine teams in the Big 10 have winning conference records, an ACC team has defeated six of them.
A middle-of-the-ACC pack North Carolina took Alabama to 4 OTs before finally losing.
I could go on and on, but if I need to just try and convince you the ACC is pretty darn good 1-10 then you just don’t want to believe it.
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