By Brian Murphy, WRAL

The Atlantic Coast Conference, long known for its men’s basketball prowess, is intent on reversing a pattern of what it sees as pattern of disrespect from the NCAA Tournament selection committee.

The 15-team league has received five bids in each of the last three tournaments, far fewer than the Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC. The ACC has placed four different teams in the Final Four in those three seasons, including NC State in March.

“We just feel like the last three years with five invitations, each of those [three] years, is not reflective of the basketball that’s being played in this league, the coaches that are in this league, the student-athletes and players that are in this league,” ACC commissioner Jim Phillips said Wednesday during his annual address at the ACC Basketball Tipoff event.

The league placed at least seven teams in the NCAA Tournament each year it was played between 2016 and 2021. This is the first season for the ACC as an 18-team league with the additions of Cal, Stanford and SMU, none known for their men’s basketball tradition.

The lack of recent bids has been an ongoing source of frustration for the league, its coaches and schools.

“I’m very disappointed at the amount of teams that we have gotten into the tournament,” said NC State coach Kevin Keatts, whose team needed to win the ACC Tournament to earn a berth. And then it reached the Final Four. “The reason we’re going to the Final Four is because we have a great conference and we’re battle-tested.”

Phillips said the conference office undertook an “extensive statistical analysis” of scheduling to better understand how it impacts the NCAA’s NET ratings and the selection process. The league established working groups for discussions with coaches and athletic directors. It talked with consultants and ESPN, its television partner, on how to better position the league.

“From top to bottom, this league has been undervalued,” Phillips said. “But it remains clear that the competition within the ACC prepares our teams for postseason play.”

The ACC is 33-15 over the last three years in the tournament. The Big East, led by two-time reigning national champion Connecticut, is 29-12 over that time. The Big 12, which is often touted as the top men’s basketball league in the nation, is 29-20 in that period including a national championship by Kansas in 2022.

The Big Ten received 23 bids over the last three years and has gone 25-23. The SEC is 22-22 during that time.

Choose your fighter or NCAA men’s basketball conference (NCAA tournament bids/records over last three years): pic.twitter.com/K5d3CZqSpV

— Brian Murphy (@murphsturph) October 9, 2024

Phillips said the league has learned some things: the importance of scheduling good teams in non-conference play, understanding the metrics better and “whether we like it or not, the narrative starts to get set in November and December.”

Said Keatts: “I hope we have a great November and December where they can no longer use your non-conference against you, and that’s been one of the biggest issues is our non-conference, according to the talking heads, hasn’t been great.”

The ACC, too, has been hampered by some really bad teams at the bottom of the league, games that bring down the entire conference. Louisville went 8-24 (3-17 in the ACC) in 2023-24 and 4-28 (2-18 in the ACC) in 2022-23. Florida State was 9-23 in 2022-23.

“We’ve had a drag at the bottom of the conference very directly,” Phillips said. He added: “I really believe the bottom of our league won’t be maybe as bad and in as difficult of a spot.”

The league is also looking to ESPN to better promote its top teams. Fans see what the network does for SEC football, and wonder why, perhaps outside of heavy promotion for the two Duke-North Carolina games, ACC basketball doesn’t get the same type of treatment. ESPN owns all of the television rights for both leagues and each league has a conference network backed by ESPN.

“We have to tell our story better,” Phillips said. “That’s on me. We just have to do that relative to the outlets that we have. We have one of only three networks, collegiate networks, but then we have this great partner in ESPN. I think you’re going to see really that ratcheted up both on the men’s side and on the women’s side this year.”

Phillips said he supports a small expansion of the current 68-team NCAA Tournament. The NCAA presented an expansion plan to Division I conference commissioners in January to expand the field by four or eight teams.

Phillips has been a member of both the men’s and women’s selection committees. He said he trusts the committee, which is chaired this year by North Carolina athletics director Bubba Cunningham.

“We have to be more intriguing and deserve to be selected than maybe what we’ve done,” Phillips said. “That’s why we did a complete kind of rebuild and look at this thing objectively. Don’t be sensitive about it. Coaches, don’t be sensitive if we call you out on schedule and some of those things.”

But, Phillips acknowledged, there’s only so much the league can do. It’s up to teams to win games.

“We have the structure in place,” he said. “We’ll promote the heck out of our programs on the men and women’s sides. We’ll have great platforms for them to play on. We have to win. We have to win.”

Source: wralsportsfan.com