ACComplish greatness?
The Atlantic Coast Conference is “strongly considering” moving its men’s basketball programs from a 20-game league schedule to 18 as soon as this season, according to a report from CBS Sports. In theory the move would allow teams to play more marquee games in the non-conference schedule, with the intention of increasing the conference’s odds to field more teams in the NCAA Tournament.
The ACC has struggled to keep pace with other power conferences in the rapidly evolving college sports landscape. The SEC, Big Ten and Big 12 earned 14, eight and seven bids to the 2025 NCAA Tournament while the ACC had just four. The ACC went 2-14 in the most recent SEC/ACC Challenge.
ACC commissioner Jim Phillips, conference athletics directors and ESPN have been in discussions to move from 20 conference games to 18 starting with the 2025-26 season, according to CBS. The expectation is that the proposal will be approved when the league’s administrators meet in May for its annual spring meetings, per CBS.
The 18-game proposal discussed by the ACC’s administrators would consist of one game against 16 teams and two games against a permanent rival. For the Syracuse Orange, that would mean Pittsburgh or Boston College.
This upcoming season, Syracuse is committed to playing in the Player’s Era Festival, an NIL-focused tournament during Thanksgiving week which distributes $1 million to each participating team’s preferred collective. The Player’s Era Festival will have 18 teams this upcoming season and plans to expand to 32 teams in 2026.
The ACC initially expanded its 18-game league schedule to 20 during the 2019-2020 season. In recent history the ACC has struggled to compete in the non-conference portion of its basketball schedule, curbing its NET rankings. For leagues as a whole, NET rankings are hard to improve upon once its teams enter conference play.
Despite the league’s waning success vis-à-vis team inclusion in the field of 68, the ACC has still placed at least one team in the Final Four in five of the last six NCAA Tournaments. The overall drop in league success has run parallel with the retirements of a legendary coaching cohort in Mike Krzyzewski, Roy Williams, Jim Boeheim, Mike Brey, Tony Bennett and now Leonard Hamilton and Jim Larranaga.
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Edit: a previous version of this article stated that not all 18 member ACC programs would play each other in a given season under the 18-game model. That’s incorrect and has been removed from the article.