So maybe Josh Pastner was right all along.
This is a frightening thought, because if Pastner was right that the ACC was incorrectly dissed during the regular season, the Georgia Tech coach might be right about other things too, like every other coach in the ACC who isn't already in the Hall of Fame being a Hall of Famer, or that the league should switch to a 28-game round-robin league schedule.
"I'm always pounding on the pavement saying we should have eight or nine this year," Pastner said during the ACC tournament in Brooklyn.
Based on how things have gone for the ACC in the NCAA tournament, he has an argument at least for six or seven. The ACC may have been down during the season — both in terms of subjective perception and objective metrics — but it's up, up and away now.
Three of its five NCAA tournament teams are through to the Sweet 16 — Duke, Miami and North Carolina — and the conference is 8-2 so far. Only the Big 12 has a better record, and no one has more teams still alive. When you throw in Wake Forest and Virginia, both 2-0 in the NIT, it's a little crazy to think the ACC would have been a four-bid league if Duke had taken care of business against Virginia Tech in Brooklyn.
Late Sunday night, as Miami held a double-digit lead over Auburn, the giddy Hurricanes fans and their leftover Duke counterparts joined forces in an enthusiastic "ACC! ACC!" chant. Suddenly, the ACC has a lot to celebrate.
The SEC spent the season crowing about its sudden basketball relevance only to be almost entirely irrelevant by the second weekend of the tournament — with two No. 2s eliminated, throwing the entire bracket into chaos — while the ACC was constantly defending its record for months, only to offer the most effective defense in the month when it matters most.
"Charlie Moore, you ask him about the ACC, he's already played in the Pac-12," Miami coach Jim Larranaga said. "He played in the Big 12. He played in the Big East, and now he's in the ACC. So when he talks about how good the ACC is, he knows. He's played against all those teams."
It's not quite 2015 or 2016, when the ACC set and then broke its own record with five and then six teams in the Sweet 16, but given the perception of the league over the course of the season, it might as well be. And it's a complete turnaround from last year, when the ACC fizzled to a 4-7 record, losing five first-round games despite a better average seed (7.6) than this year (8.4).
"Obviously, I thought the ACC was pretty good, and I think people are starting to see that a little bit more with the tournament going well," Duke's Mark Williams said. "I wouldn't just say that's the ACC this year. I think it happens every year with a conference in particular that does well in the tournament. It always gets a little bit more love."
Certainly, there is some recency bias. Ten games at the end of the season do not outweigh the 142 nonconference games the ACC played at the beginning of it, full of bad losses that raised valid questions about the ACC's strength. But these postseason results do indicate that a conference full of teams that depended heavily on transfers and freshmen this season did take more time to reach its collective full potential than other conferences with more continuity, as Larranaga argued in New York.
Either way, the country's premier basketball conference is playing like it now.
Late in the Miami game, when the outcome was no longer in doubt, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey got up from his courtside seat and walked a few feet over to where Jim Phillips, his ACC counterpart, was sitting. Phillips, who had worn a blue-striped tie for the Duke game, had changed to an orange one. The two commissioners had a brief, cordial conversation. The partisan chants broke out shortly after. The ACC had spoken.
