Potential for a lopsided ACC
As foolhardy as it may seem, assume for the moment that we can look one year ahead and know what the major conferences will look like in 2024-25. What will we see?The old Pac-12 has dispersed. UCLA, USC, Oregon and Washington are in the Big Ten. Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah play in the Big 12.
Cal and Stanford, along with SMU, are in the ACC. While the Bears and Cardinal have national championship banners (from 1959 and 1942, respectively) and the Mustangs reached a Final Four (in 1956), these peak performances date to the distant past.
More recently, the trio collectively has not won an NCAA tournament game since 2014. Cal and SMU rank near the bottom of the nation's (current or soon-to-be) major conference programs in terms of performance over the past five seasons. For that matter, current ACC members like Boston College, Wake Forest, Pitt and Georgia Tech are in much the same statistical boat.
Source: ESPN (Article re the ACC)
Which means in a year's time the ACC will have six members that, for now, rank among the bottom 12 nationally for performance over the past five seasons.
Lowest Average Adjusted Efficiency Margin, 2019-23
(Major-Conference Programs Only)
| SCHOOL | 5-YEAR ADJEM | 2024-25 CONFERENCE |
|---|---|---|
| California | -1.09 | ACC |
| Boston College | +1.96 | ACC |
| Georgia | +3.46 | SEC |
| DePaul | +5.07 | Big East |
| Georgetown | +5.21 | Big East |
| South Carolina | +5.78 | SEC |
| Wake Forest | +5.95 | ACC |
| Pitt | +6.35 | ACC |
| Vanderbilt | +6.35 | SEC |
| Nebraska | +6.64 | Big Ten |
| Georgia Tech | +7.16 | ACC |
| SMU | +8.05 | ACC |
| Source: kenpom.com |
Perhaps onetime Stanford star Mark Madsen can work similar wonders at Cal, just like onetime Duke star Jeff Capel did in Pittsburgh last season. Who knows?
What we can say in the present tense, however, is that the ACC didn't get as much of a basketball lift from this wave of expansion as its rivals did. Again looking at performance over the past five seasons, the ACC's new arrivals recorded an average adjusted efficiency margin of plus-5.58. That's a good deal weaker than what we see from soon-to-be newcomers to the Big Ten (plus-14.71), the Big 12 (plus-14.90) and the SEC (plus-17.58).
