Okay, what's become of ACC Hoops?

NIL/TV money is always a problem.

For the other 17 schools, generally the good basketball coaches are at the football schools, and the basketball schools have bad coaches. The reverse is true for ACC football. Not to pick on Wake Forest, but you could argue they should fire Clawson and Forbes and hire Carl Franks and Nate Oates. (I actually don't think that, but it's the fastest example that came to mind.)
 
We added a bunch of schools for football reasons who have okay-to-not basketball programs, which watered down the league. Rivalries other than Duke/ UNC or maybe UNC/ Wuffies have been minimized by the teams not playing each other as often. Several legacy schools made terrible coaching hires or, in some cases, a series of them.

Result: the ACc feels like Just Another Conference now, and without that extra something something, it’s harder and harder to compete with the allure and $ of the SEC/B1G.
 
roywhite said:
The 2-14 record vs the SEC was shocking, or at least I thought so.

Theories are welcome---loss of senior coaches? getting outspent on NIL?
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NIL is still a relatively new phenomenon, the decline of the ACC in terms of basketball prowess is not. The coaching loss is definitely part, and the new hires are not taking advantage of the program reputation. Outside of Duke UNC and UVA (until now), you can't reliably count on any other program to get 20+ wins and an almost guaranteed NCAA birth. Did you ever think there would come a day when we'd long for someone like Paul Hewitt? Dude did less with more than almost anyone in his time, YET he could still get talent to GT and make the tourney a lot of years. And I don't even think he was that good, but GT has been a mess since he left. Keates and Brownell always seem like guys who are ready to make that next leap but their teams always end up losing games they absolutely shouldn't. L'ville is a disaster, who knows when Cuse will return to competence. SMU adds nothing. FSU and Miami appear to be on severe decline. I think the league just has bad coaches and bad programs right now. NIL can exacerbate that to some degree but a lot of these schools have money

EDIT: Its crazy to think, but the ACC is a much better football conference than basketball. If you matched them agains the SEC, the SEC still wins but I bet the record is not 2-14
 
Twenty some years ago 7 of the 9 ACC basketball teams were ranked. This year the SEC has more ranked basketball teams in the top 10 than ACC wins in the ACC/SEC Challenge. The SEC has become the best basketball conference since NIL. Let that sink in. The SEC has and is the best football conference. The potential for a two division NFL-type AFC-NFC college alignment with a Big 10-SEC headliner is looming. This will leave a lot of teams without strong enough football to make some decisions, since they will not be in the big boy club. K, Roy, Boehiem, and Bennet leaving, maybe due to NIL, has not helped the ACC. I do not think it really mattered in the long run, since it was gonna happen with them or without them.
 
It's been building for a while now. The middle-to-bottom tier schools haven't invested in their coaching hires. So as the old guard has aged out, the quality hasn't been supplemented. Pitino, Boeheim, Coach K, Williams, and Bennett gone, and so far only Scheyer looks promising among the replacements. And NIL has made things worse, as outside of Duke the conference is losing out on the recruiting trail (so can't make up for lack of coaching with better talent).
 
It's the coaches. The ACC has just whiffed on coaching hires the last decade plus. Virginia Tech hired Mike Young the same year Alabama hired Oats and Arkansas hired Musselman. They were all initially paid about the same amount of money. The latter two hit, the former not so much. The disparity is compounded by Virginia Tech losing a good coach to the SEC (although I think that had more to do with Buzz being a Texas guy than any specific deficiency at VPI).

Wake hasn't really found their guy since Skip Prosser died. Ditto NC State over that same period (last year's run notwithstanding). Where the SEC had a couple big hits with retread coaches from major programs (Barnes and Pearl), the ACC had two misses (Mack and Pastner). Programs that could be good have stagnated under long tenured coaches who probably need to ride off into the sunset, or should have ridden off earlier (Hamilton, Boeheim, Larranaga, Brey). Tony Bennett was maybe trending in that direction, but then he quit.

Just across the board, the quality of coaching in the ACC is way down. I don't think it's a resources thing, at least not primarily (although I guess it might have been hard for whatever the ACC's equivalent of Ole Miss is to pony up $4mil for Chris Beard). I just think the ADs have made bad decisions about retaining people who need to go and picking their replacements when they do.
 
HoKogan said:
SMU adds nothing.
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SMU's basketball tradition isn't much, but I actually think they may end up being a valuable addition for ACC hoops, as they have been for football. Enfield was kinda meh at USC but he's already recruiting well (247 has his 2025 class at #10 in the nation currently). They have some rich boosters who are in the irrational exuberance phase of their move to a major conference, so there is a lot of money splashing around over there. I think they end up a net positive.
 
We watered down our conference with too many teams and the coaching has taken a nose dive. We've lost K, Roy, Boeheim, Pitino, and Bennett. Larranega and Hamilton aren't at their peak anymore. These things are not quickly rectified, even in the days of transfer portals and NIL. In fact, the conference has been on a slide for quite awhile now, and I'm not sure how you bootstrap that many schools that are trending towards apathetic.

It definitely makes me feel much less interested/concerned in conference atrophy. Maybe it is time for Duke to find a new home?
 
Like many things, it is a combination of factors.

Notre Dame and Louisville are dealing with significant injuries.
Virginia Tech's NIL situation has tanked their program. The good players they had last year left and they couldn't bring in good players to replace them.
A couple teams are going through coaching transitions (or will soon) with various levels of success - Syracuse, Miami, FSU, North Carolina, Duke come to mind.

I think Clemson and Pitt have done a nice job of getting their programs to the right level. Wake, Louisville, NC State, and Virginia need to be at that level most years. I thought Wake would be a lot better this year, frankly. Sallis is a talented player and they have other talented and experienced players around him. Louisville seems like they hired the right guy in Pat Kelsey, so hopefully they are back to being a top 25 team in a couple years. NC State had that magical postseason run last year, but was that it for Kevin Keatts or a sign of things to come? It's so hard to tell. Bennett's struggles with maintaining the culture at Virginia during the NIL/transfer portal era has hurt the conference, too.

If the NC schools + Louisville, Pitt, Clemson, and one of the Florida Schools can get back to being consistent Top 50 teams year in and year out, I think ACC basketball will be fine. I was hoping for that this year but alas.
 
The SEC is doing a hostile takeover by outshining us at our core competency. Just ahead of the ESPN contract negotiation.
We are being intentionally devalued and we aren't fighting it at a conference level. And we are doing worse at a school level.

The ACC needs new revenue, fast. I don't know if that's approaching LIV, seeking new distribution sources outside of ESPN (Amazon, Apple, Netflix) looking to Canada for an international conference or making a new magic widget of some sort to sell.... or even proposing a merger with the B1G to let us both cast off dead weight members.. if the B1G doesn't see the SEC as an existential threat, they will be forever stuck as the Washington generals to the SEC's Globetrotters..

The mindset of the ACC is to be conservative and reactionary. Its time for leadership to push the envelope and to make as much public as they dare cuz it certainly looks and feels like they are the band playing on the deck of the Titanic.
 
Mtn.Devil.91.92.01.10.15 said:
It definitely makes me feel much less interested/concerned in conference atrophy. Maybe it is time for Duke to find a new home?
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I also find that my attachment to the ACC is due to history, not present or likely future.

I would hate to stop playing State and Wake. 9F the cheating heels. And the rest of the conference, well -- I gotta go back to Virginia under Terry Holland or Tech under Bobby Cremins to really get juiced about any team outside of the Big Four. The only other team that got me juiced -- Maryland under Lefty and then Sweaty -- is already gone.
 
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Mtn.Devil.91.92.01.10.15 said:
We watered down our conference with too many teams and the coaching has taken a nose dive. We've lost K, Roy, Boeheim, Pitino, and Bennett. Larranega and Hamilton aren't at their peak anymore. These things are not quickly rectified, even in the days of transfer portals and NIL. In fact, the conference has been on a slide for quite awhile now, and I'm not sure how you bootstrap that many schools that are trending towards apathetic.

It definitely makes me feel much less interested/concerned in conference atrophy. Maybe it is time for Duke to find a new home?
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Agree. I looked at each pre-game separately via stubhub. Tickets at ACC venues were available for between $2 and about $20 with one glaring exception, $610 minimum. Think we all know where the $610 ticket was.

Except for Duke and maybe the Cheats, no one in ACC territory cares unless their team is great.
 
The SEC basketball prowess has definitely increased in the NIL/transfer at-will era. It used to be basically Kentucky and not much else with an occasional team or two also being quite good. The ACC has also gotten worse over the last several years for various reasons that are not all NIL/transfer related. So, the two conferences have been trending in opposite directions (And these days, a single year can make a HUGE difference as you can totally remake a team), so when that happens, and some randomness of matchups, you get a 2-14 result....Still, not good, not good at all. The bottom of the ACC this year is REALLY bad.
 
Money. The SEC has more, and that shows up on the court. They have way better coaches because they can afford them. They have made huge investments in facilities because they can afford them. They can recruit better players because they can afford them.

Interestingly, the Big 10 has money, too, but it has generated less success (although some). On this point, I credit the SEC's athletic departments for making many smart, bold coaching choices (and some controversial ones). College basketball success is still primarily a function of the quality of coaches, and the SEC (not universally) has done an excellent job on this front.

The ACC coaching hires have been less inspiring, and I am confident that money has much to do with that.
 
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