Yesterday, the ACC officially announced a pivot to an 18-game conference basketball schedule. While other power conferences worry 20 conference games will hurt their teams’ tournament chances by giving teams too many losses, the ACC is worried that by scheduling Pitt 20 times, its teams’ strength of schedule ratings are taking on too much water. They’re not entirely wrong.
Will the pivot work? Will reducing the conference schedule by two games get more ACC teams in the tournament? Probably not. Strength of schedule matters to the selection committee, but usually in a roundabout way and sometimes in nonsensical directions. I mean, maybe this avoids a team winding up with a terrible Q1 record, like 2023 UNC and 2025 UNC did. Maybe this gives the conference’s middle class more of a chance to prove itself against other power conferences. Those are fringe possibilities. Most likely, ACC teams will continue getting the respect or disrespect they earn through their play on the court. If the average teams scheduled with these two extra nonconference games are better than the average ACC team, the plan should theoretically at least improve strength of schedule numbers across the league. But it’d be a marginal improvement. The RPI era is over. You can’t beef up your opponents’ opponents’ winning percentage and call it a day.
What might make a difference is that the ACC won’t have every team play every other team in the conference every year. From the release:
“The 18-game schedule features teams starting league play in late December and ending on the first Saturday of March. Each team will play one primary partner both home and away as well as one variable partner home and away. The variable partner will be determined each season. Teams will play one game, home or away, against 14 of the remaining 15 teams annually.”
In English, what that’s saying is that each team will play two conference opponents twice, fourteen conference opponents once, and one conference opponent zero times, with the zero-game opponent and one of the two-game opponents changing every year.
Most likely, this is going to be used to ease West Coast scheduling or to give Duke an out if it sounds boring to play a Syracuse team on its way to a 13–19 finish. But this is the lever that could most help the ACC around the bubble. I’m guessing the ACC won’t attempt this, because precision would be difficult and leaks would create infighting, but the ACC could theoretically try to increase an expected bubble team’s total number of Q1 opponents while saving them from a potentially lethal trip to Chestnut Hill.
Obviously, this is a dumb thing to think about when making a schedule. A 17-game single round robin with one annual rivalry at the end would be better sport and better entertainment. But with the ACC trying everything it can to stop the backslide, don’t ignore the possibility the “variable partner” and zero-game opponent are the real priorities behind the move.
(Also, this is probably less about tournament bids and more about giving Duke two more huge nonconference games, along with all the free marketing and TV revenue those nonconference games bring.)
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