The NCAA selection committee did Duke a big favor by leaving the Blue Devils as a No. 2 seed close to home in Greenville, S.C.
It did not do Duke any favors by sending the Blue Devils out west, where Mike Krzyzewski has never won an NCAA tournament game.
Still, after 42 years, there’s at least one empty box left to check in his final postseason if the Blue Devils can make it to San Francisco.
It’s hard to look at this weekend’s results and see Duke on the No. 2 line and SEC champion Tennessee and Big East champion Villanova as No. 3 seeds, but it’s a reminder of how the committee operates: One of the first things it does when it gathers on Wednesday is pick the No. 1 and No. 2 seeds. That can change as the committee “scrubs” adjacent teams on the seed list, comparing them against each other, but it’s not easy.
That played to North Carolina’s benefit in 2017 when the Tar Heels lost to Duke in the ACC semifinals and held onto a No. 1 seed on their way to a national title; it benefited Duke this season despite the Blue Devils’ loss to Virginia Tech on Saturday in the ACC title game.
And while the ACC, after much hand-wringing and justified worrying, still got five teams in with thanks to the Hokies forcing the issue, only Duke got better than a No. 8 seed, with UNC eighth, Miami 10th, Virginia Tech 11th and Notre Dame in an 11th-seed First Four play-in in Dayton.
Duke is clearly the standard-bearer as the ACC’s tattered reputation once again hangs on its NCAA tournament performance.
The ACC had a chance to rewrite that narrative in 2021 and failed miserably. Florida State and Syracuse made the Sweet 16, but the ACC’s other five teams all lost their openers. The four wins were the fewest for the ACC since the tournament expanded in 1985.
This time around, the ACC has even fewer chances at redemption, with a post-expansion low of five teams in the tournament, although the ACC was on track for five bids in 2020 before COVID intervened.
There’s a lot riding on this, and not just for Duke, the ACC’s lone national-title contender, in Krzyzewski’s final season.
This tournament also feels like an inflection point for the league that has set the standard for college basketball for decades and has produced three of the past six national champions. Since 2019, when three of the four No. 1 seeds came out of the ACC, it has been a three-season slide in the wrong direction.
Conference record isn’t something the NCAA tournament committee takes into consideration, but the idea of a 13-7 ACC team like Wake Forest not only being left in the cold but not even being in the first four out is as stunning as it is damning, because it reveals how little value those 13 ACC wins actually had.
The argument from ACC advocates is that its admittedly terrible nonconference results obscured the growth and development its better teams underwent during the conference season, and that the ACC is better than argument or analysis would imply.
But of the ACC teams that made the tournament, only Miami has more than one impact transfer who arrived this season – and Wake Forest’s transfers were its strength. It certainly wasn’t why Virginia or Syracuse or Louisville were down, all teams that have been national powers in the recent past.
Some say that is a big part of the ACC’s problem, that the names expected to be atop the ACC – other than Duke – aren’t atop the ACC. Can the league possibly be all that good if North Carolina and Virginia are not? If Florida State and Louisville struggle? Certainly, it doesn’t look good.
But the metrics don’t care how it looks. There are objective and accurate ways to measure the strength and weaknesses of conferences without any names attached, and they weren’t flattering for the ACC. The committee clearly applied them.
