The ACC became the latest truly national college sports conference Friday with its additions of Stanford, Cal and SMU. And while the league’s spanning from California to Boston may have been the right move from a pure survivalist perspective, it does come at a cost: weakening further what used to be one of the best men’s college basketball products around.
Current ACC members won nine of the 19 men’s basketball national titles from 2001 to ’19 (Louisville in ’13 and Syracuse in ’03 were members of other conferences at the time, though Maryland was an ACC member when it won its ’02 championship). The league won three of five titles from 2015 to ’19, ranked in the top three of KenPom’s conference rankings every year from 2014 to ’19 and has a deep, storied history in the sport.
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But things haven’t been great lately. The league had its worst season in the KenPom era (1997 to today) in 2023, with six teams finishing outside the top 100 nationally and just four in the top 50. Only one of its teams escaped the first weekend of the NCAA tournament, and one of its biggest brands in Louisville looks to be in complete disarray, having posted an embarrassing 4–28 mark last season. It wasn’t long ago the league had Mike Krzyzewski, Roy Williams, Rick Pitino and Jim Boeheim battling one another. Those four have been replaced with Jon Scheyer, Hubert Davis, Kenny Payne and Adrian Autry. The four programs are in extremely different positions from one another at the moment, but replacing four Hall of Famers with four coaches without a single game of head coaching experience created some pretty big question marks about program sustainability, and the rest of the league hasn’t picked up much slack during the transition period.
All that’s to say that now was not the time to further dilute the conference’s basketball brand. For a league already trending down in men’s hoops to add three weak basketball brands further descends the ACC into college basketball mediocrity. That trend may have been inevitable without the three new programs, but the additions make matters worse, not better.
Stanford, Cal and SMU have combined to win zero men’s NCAA tournament games since the start of the 2014–15 season and have made three combined appearances in the Big Dance in that stretch. SMU hasn’t advanced in March Madness in more than three decades. Cal’s history is similarly bleak; its last trip to the NCAA tournament’s second weekend more than 25 years in the rearview mirror. Stanford has some degree of tradition but at present is so handicapped by academic requirements that winning like it did under Mike Montgomery seems close to impossible.
The ACC is also a league of iconic venues and fan bases: from Cameron Indoor Stadium at Duke to the “Dean Dome” in Chapel Hill to the Carrier (now JMA Wireless) Dome in Syracuse. Stanford, Cal and SMU each averaged fewer than 4,000 fans per game last season, with Cal’s attendance at a measly 2,155 per game (albeit for a 3–29 team). At least the Big Ten’s and Big 12’s national expansions came with a carrot or two for hoops fans: UCLA’s storied program for the Big Ten, Arizona for the Big 12. The biggest thing the ACC’s new additions bring the league in men’s basketball is more apathy, the one thing the conference didn’t need.
There’s also the chance this move will accelerate North Carolina’s departure from the league, which would be a true death knell for the ACC as a basketball powerhouse. UNC’s Board of Trustees announced its opposition to the expansion moves Thursday night, and the Heels will be a valued asset whenever the next round of realignment comes to roost. A Carolina departure could present one of the most cataclysmic shifts in college basketball: the Duke–North Carolina rivalry no longer being a conference game. That’s skipping some steps here, and the schools could well ensure that they play each other every year even without being in the same league. But if you’re scripting out the biggest potential blow realignment could have on college basketball, disrupting its most iconic rivalry would be at the top of the list.
It’s not hard to understand why the ACC felt this was best for its league. The money and stability that these three programs provide will help everyone in the conference (particularly those that would likely get left behind if top league members started bailing) will keep cashing football checks longer. There’s a reason 12 of 15 schools were on board with this. But this life raft comes with a cost: It’s yet another step down the march to irrelevance for a once-great basketball conference.
