Cal Sports Report

ACC Basketball Ain’t What It Used to Be, but Rick Pitino Has a Solution

Cal and Stanford are not being buried in what was the best basketball conference in the country not long ago
Jake Curtis|
St. John's coach Rick Pitino
St. John's coach Rick Pitino | Wendell Cruz-Imagn Images

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What has happened to ACC basketball, and would Rick Pitino’s recent suggestion that the ACC and Big East should merge raise the declining reputation of both conferences?

Pitino’s thoughts will be addressed later, but first we have the peculiar plight of ACC basketball.

When it was announced that Cal and Stanford would join the ACC, it was assumed the Bay Area basketball teams would get buried in its new conference, based on the ACC’s tradition of excellence in that sport.

That’s why Cal and Stanford were picked to finish 16th and 17th, respectively, in the 18-team conference in the preseason coaches poll. But Stanford has a winning conference record at the moment, and Cal, while just 5-10 in ACC games, has shown it can compete with conference teams other than Duke.    It appears both Stanford and Cal will be among the 15 teams to qualify for the ACC tournament, while long-time ACC members Boston College, North Carolina State and Miami are the three teams most likely to stay home.

Perhaps Cal and particularly Stanford are better than expected, but the bigger reason they have survived is that the ACC is just not very good this season and is a poor representative of a conference that ruled the sport less than a decade ago.

The most recent NCAA tournament projections by ESPN, CBS Sports, NCAA.com and USA Today suggest the ACC will get just three or four teams into the Big Dance, while the SEC will get 13 or 14.

On Saturday, the NCAA selection committee released its seeding of the top 16 teams if the tournament were held today, and only one ACC team – Duke at No. 3 – was among that group of 16 while SEC teams occupied five of the top six seeds.

ESPN recently ranked the Power Five basketball conferences, and the ACC was fifth, closing with this comment:

Newcomers SMU, Stanford and even Cal have been more than respectable, but that's as much a comment on the room they entered as what they brought to the party. In short, the ACC is going to need another overachieving March to make up for three months of hide-your-eyes-quality basketball..

Duke is the only ACC team in the top 20 of the most recent AP rankings. Duke is elite, the two next-best teams, Clemson and Louisville, are decent but not great, Wake Forest and SMU are on the NCAA tournament bubble, and the rest are fighting for respectability.

Compare all this to 2017, when the 15-team ACC finished the regular season with six teams in the top 25 and sent nine teams to the NCAA tournament, or 2019 when an ACC team had the top seed in three of the four NCAA tournament regions.  This year, the SEC might have three of the four top seeds.

What’s different now? Well, it’s been suggested that some of the money the SEC is amassing from football is being shared with its basketball programs to enhance the schools' profile in that sport.  Others claim the 2016 addition of former Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese as an SEC advisor for basketball initiated the SEC's surge.

Maybe those things have helped SEC basketball indirectly, but the biggest difference for the ACC can be stated in one word: coaching.

In 2017, Rick Pitino, Roy Williams, Mike Krzyzewski, Tony Bennett and Jim Boeheim were coaching ACC teams.  All five have won national championships, and they, along with Jim Larranaga, accounted for 37 Final Four appearances.

None of those six is coaching in the ACC this season, and the current ACC coaches have combined for no national titles and two Final Fours – one by Hubert Davis and one by Kevin Keatts.

Meanwhile, the SEC has six head coaches who have taken teams to the Final Four, combining for nine national semifinal berths.

The best example of the contrasting directions of the ACC and the SEC is Buzz Williams. In 2019, he left Virginia Tech where he was making $3 million after reaching the NCAA tournament in each of his last three seasons to go to a Texas A&M program that had just two NCAA tournament berths over the previous seven years but pays Williams $4.5 million annually. Now Williams has the Aggies ranked No. 8 in the country while Virginia Tech is 11-14 and headed for its third straight season without an NCAA tournament invitation.

The difference a coach can make is also illustrated at St. John’s, where Pitino has his Big East team ranked No. 9 in the country after the Red Storm got to the NCAA tournament only once in the previous nine years (barely making as a No. 11 seed in 2019).

But the Big East is projected to get just four NCAA tournament berths, so Pitino offered a fix while speaking to Krzyzewski on Sirius XM College Sports Radio:

"I jumped on your bandwagon with the suggestion that you had about combining with the ACC, because I've been trying to get them to start a Super League  basketball league and get up to 18 teams, 16 teams. Eleven is just not enough," Pitino said, according to a 247 Sports report. "And right now, a little bit like the ACC, we're not typical of the Big East of the past that's getting eight, nine, 10 teams in the NCAA Tournament. So I think we're missing the boat if we don't expand. Most of the presidents, and probably including mine — who is a very knowledgeable basketball fan — they think about money. They think about the bottom line."

"I wish they would add Dayton, Memphis, combine with the ACC," Pitino said. "But just have a super basketball league."

"Today, football has dominated everything," Pitino said. "A bad football game on a Saturday outdraws an NBA playoff game. So we need to do something about that in the Big East. The coaches, I think, are in favor of a Super League. I just think the presidents are against it."

Big East coaches could add some prestige to Pitino’s proposed ACC/Big East Super League with the addition of Pitino (2 national championships), Dan Hurley (two national championships), Thad Matta (two Final Fours) and Shaka Smart (one Final Four).

The question is, who would be invited to join that ACC/Big East Super League. Combining all 18 ACC teams with all 11 Big East teams would create a 29-team league in which not all teams would play each other unless the nonconference schedule were reduced to one or two games.  That’s impractical.

If only a handful of ACC teams – say, Duke, North Carolina, Louisville, Clemson -- were included to create such a Super League of 16 to 18 teams, Cal and Stanford likely would be left out.

Of course, there is no indication that such a merger is even being discussion among the parties that matter, so this is merely pie-in-the-sky talk from an accomplished basketball coach.

We’re left with one undeniable reality: The ACC ain't what it used to be. We also left with one question: Is the ACC's decline this season an aberration or a trend?

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Jake Curtis
JAKE CURTIS

Jake Curtis worked in the San Francisco Chronicle sports department for 27 years, covering virtually every sport, including numerous Final Fours, several college football national championship games, an NBA Finals, world championship boxing matches and a World Cup. He was a Cal beat writer for many of those years, and won awards for his feature stories.

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