Brad Brownell doesn’t agree with the outside perception of the ACC this past hoops season.
Sitting outside The Ritz-Carlton on Florida’s Amelia Island, the site of this week’s ACC spring meetings, Clemson’s veteran men’s basketball coach thought back on a year in which the conference produced just five NCAA Tournament teams (and one of those, Virginia Tech, had to win the conference tournament just to qualify). It’s the lowest number of NCAA bids the league has produced since just four teams made it in 2013.
Yet the ACC made up nearly 40% of the Elite Eight. One of the three teams, Duke, was a No. 2 seed in Mike Krzyzewski’s final season on the Blue Devils’ bench, but Miami (10) got there as a double-digit seed. And North Carolina advanced to the championship game as an 8 seed, the lowest to ever play for it all.
Brownell pointed to all of that as evidence to support his argument that the league wasn’t down as bad as some thought.
“That’s what’s frustrating is clearly some of our teams were missed and seeded too low based on what they did,” Brownell said. “Our league was probably better overall than what it was perceived.”
That narrative was largely created, Brownell believes, because of how the season started, which, for the ACC, was much slower than the finish. Clemson, which missed out on the postseason all together after playing in two of the last three NCAA Tournaments, had its share of non-conference blemishes, falling to West Virginia, St. Bonaventure and Rutgers – all teams outside the top 75 of the NET rankings – before the calendar flipped to December. Miami’s non-conference loss to Central Florida contributed to the Hurricanes being squarely on the bubble heading into Selection Sunday before sneaking in.
Brownell also used Virginia as an example of a team that struggled to click early in the season. The Cavaliers, replacing multiple starters off its NCAA Tournament team a year ago, finished the regular season 18-12, including a 12-8 mark in ACC play, but losses to Navy and James Madison within the first month were smudges on Virginia’s postseason resume that played a part in relegating the Cavaliers to the National Invitation Tournament.
“Our team was better in February than we were in November and December,” said Brownell, whose team won five of its last six games to finish 17-16 overall. “Miami was way better. Notre Dame was better. And obviously North Carolina was drastically better. So there’s frustration a little bit in that this isn’t right. The narrative of the league and a lot of your teams is already determined by early in the league schedule, and so there’s no way to really fix it or change it.”
But Brownell has some ideas. With roster turnover as frequent as it’s ever been in the sport in the transfer portal era, he wondered aloud if it’s time for the league to “think outside the box” with the type of scheduling on the front end that won’t harm the league’s profile as much while teams use the early part of the season to work out the kinks.
One thought Brownell has is playing more conference games in November and December. That way, he said, at least one team benefits from the outcome. Last season, the most conference games any ACC team played before January was two, or just 10% of the 20-game league slate.
“That really penalizes our league when you lose those kinds of games, right?” Brownell said, referring to Virginia’s non-conference losses. “As opposed to, hey, if you lose against a conference team, it may penalize Virginia, but it’s going to help someone else while you’re figuring it out. So then we may need to have a couple of our non-conference games in late December or early January. Do you do things like that?”
Another idea Brownell has is giving up guarantee non-conference games against teams with dangerously low NET rankings in order to get more neutral-site matchups with potential Quad 1 and Quad 2 opponents, which would give teams more chances at resume-building wins. Brownell acknowledged that may be more difficult to pull off since schools aren’t going to want to give up home games that bring in revenue, but he said he’d like to see the conference get more aggressive in assisting.
The only non-conference games on Clemson’s schedule for next season so far are whatever matchups the Tigers end up getting in the Emerald Coast Classic. Cal, Iowa and TCU round out the field for the tournament, which will be played Thanksgiving weekend in Niceville, Florida. Iowa and TCU were tournament teams this year.
“I’ve fought a little bit with the conference office at times in that I don’t know that they do enough to help some of the middle-of-the-pack ACC teams with some scheduling situations to give us a few more really good non-conference games,” Brownell said. “If there’s a way that they could help us set up some neutral-court games against somebody that we know is another Quad 1 or Quad 2 … it’s figuring out ways to do more of those types of things to give yourself more opportunities. We’ve got to be open to some of those things.”
Whether any of this could become more than ideas in the future is unclear. Brownell said they were tossed around among coaches during this week’s meetings, but he didn’t get a sense that anyone favors a particular idea over another since the conversations were what Brownell described as surface-level in nature.
“There’s a lot of moving parts in all of this,” Brownell said. “Sometimes it’s just if the league can just do a couple of things for a couple of schools at a time, we might have to do that when we can.”
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