North Carolina rallied but couldn’t finish the job on Friday against Ole Miss in the NCAA tournament, and it left a dubious distinction that’s bigger than the Tar Heels.
“I’m sorry, four teams in, but three into the main field initially. It’s concerning,” Duke head coach Jon Scheyer told reporters on Thursday.
Duke and North Carolina alone are two of the blue bloods of college basketball and have dominated the game for decades with 11 titles between the two. Other teams out of the ACC have made noise in the Big Dance before, too, over the years whether a Tim Duncan-led Wake Forest Elite Eight team in 1996 or Miami’s Final Four run in 2023 under former head coach Jim Larranaga.
Overall, the ACC has fielded two teams in the Final Four seven different times between 1981 and 2022. Since just 2000 alone, the ACC has fielded 18 Final Four teams in all.
The ACC normally sends a large number of teams to the Big Dance, but this year, only four teams made it. Clemson, Louisville, and UNC all failed to make it past the tournament’s first round.
“Every category, every angle, in regards to physicality, they not only won in the first half, they dominated us,” Tar Heels head coach Hubert Davis told reporters afterward. “There was only two choices coming out in the second half, either to respond with that same type of fight or get embarrassed. And I was really proud of how our guys fought back competitively and got back into the game.”
Despite UNC’s comeback efforts, the loss to Ole Miss may have signaled more than the ACC dwindling down to one team left. The SEC looks poised to be the top conference in college basketball for the foreseeable future amid 14 teams in the tournament, and that includes the tournament’s top overall seed in Auburn. Both the Tigers and Alabama have been the top-two this season, which included a historic No. 1 versus No. 2 matchup during the regular season.
That’s not where it ends. Amid the ACC’s downturn, speculation of joining forces with the Big East has entered the conversation. Ironically, the ACC has added former Big East schools over the years, including Syracuse, Boston College, and Pittsburgh.
“Yeah, I’ve seen that, and I think it’s really important to talk about all these things because the sustainability of getting three teams in and then one—now four,” Scheyer said. “What ends up happening is a lot of the wins that we’ve gotten in the ACC this year—we’re not alone, it’s anybody in the ACC—a lot of it’s discredited because you get into a league, you really can’t go wrong with some of the games, even if you lose, you’re not hurt by it necessarily, so there’s only upside in a lot of respects. Where in our league once the ACC started, for the most part, it’s downside.”
“So as teams, we obviously have to do a good job of winning and controlling what we can, but also, I think, looking at ways to—I’m not going to comment on the Big East because I’ve been so focused on this year with our team, and I would like for us to make a special run, blow it out with this group, do the best job that I can with my platform here of finding ways to make our game better,” Scheyer added.
Louisville notably bowed out against a Big East team, Creighton, in the first round. Cardinals senior guard J’Vonne Hadley acknowledged the challenges that the Bluejays provided.
“So you know, they were getting their shots up and they were hitting tonight,” Hadley told reporters on Thursday. “They were the better team tonight.”
