No conference in college basketball figures to have more attention heaped upon it over the next two and a half months than the ACC. The conference kicks off league play on Wednesday night, and it does so with six teams ranked in the current installment of the Associated Press Top 25.
ACC basketball 2017: Preview, predictions, important schedule dates, and 5 big storylines
How many teams will the ACC send to the NCAA Tournament? Can Duke still be a superteam? These questions and many more will be answered over the next two months.
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With two months of the 2016-17 season in the books and two months of conference play to go, let’s take a broad look at what we’ve seen from the ACC and what we can expect going forward.
Five biggest story lines
1. Can this conference send 11 teams to the tournament?
The ACC potentially matching the Big East's record of sending 11 teams to the NCAA Tournament was one of the conference's main story lines heading into the season, and that remains true with league play set to begin.
Duke, Louisville, North Carolina, Virginia, and Notre Dame would all seem to be virtual locks for the field of 68, and Florida State, Virginia Tech, NC State, Pitt, Clemson, and Miami all enter conference play with two or fewer losses. That’s 11 teams right there, with Wake Forest also sitting at a respectable 9-3 and Syracuse feeling like it has the talent necessary to overcome its disastrous 8-5 start.
Even though North Carolina fell to Villanova in the national title game, the ACC broke the 2008-09 Big East’s record for wins by a conference in a single NCAA Tournament with 19. While breaking the Big East’s mark of total teams in the field of 68 seems out of the realm of possibility, matching that mark with one fewer team — the old Big East comprised 16 programs — would still be another notch in the ACC’s domination belt.
2. Can Duke still achieve superteam status?
Few teams in recent years have entered a college basketball season with more hype than the Duke Blue Devils did entering this one. Everyone's preseason No. 1 team seemed to have the perfect mix of veteran talent and elite incoming freshmen to bring the "superteam" talk back to the college level.
Though Duke has been terrific through the season’s first eight weeks and still may be the team most likely to cut down the nets in April, it enters conference play with far more questions than we could have imagined.
First, there's the health of its three star freshmen — Harry Giles, Jayson Tatum, and Marques Bolden — who all began the season on the bench. Tatum and Bolden have each played in five games, with the former looking like he has the potential to be one of the best players in the country this season. Giles, the No. 1 player in the 2016 recruiting class, according to most scouting services, has taken longer to see the court. He made his debut on Dec. 19 against Elon but has played just 10 total minutes (and scored only 1 point) in two games. It's a solid first step to have all three of these guys seeing game action, but the question of whether all three will ever be 100 percent at the same time remains.
The other big issue currently plaguing Duke's quest for 2016-17 domination is the status of preseason Player of the Year Grayson Allen. The junior All-American is suspended indefinitely following his most recent — and most bizarre — tripping incident. Even before his suspension, Allen's scoring average and shooting percentages were both down significantly from a season ago, leading many to question if he was doing something different that was having an adverse effect on his game. Duke can still be a national title contender without Allen returning to Player of the Year form, but it's less likely that the Blue Devils will be the favorite.
Even with all these unforeseen roadblocks, Duke still enters conference play with a 12-1 record, a top-five national ranking, and a clear target on its back as the team to beat in the ACC. For now, however, any and all superteam talk has been sidelined.
3. Duke’s trio of challengers
Runaway champions are a less frequent occurrence in the ACC than a nationally liked Duke team, so it’s unlikely that the Blue Devils are going to roll to a conference title that’s out of reach by the final week of February. With that being the case, here are the three teams most likely to knock Coach K and company down the totem pole.
Reigning national runner-up North Carolina again appears to have all the pieces necessary to play its way into the final weekend of the season. The Tar Heels rolled their way to a Maui Invitational title before dropping a road game to Indiana and a neutral-court thriller against Kentucky. Despite losing Marcus Paige and Brice Johnson to the professional ranks, the 2016-17 Tar Heels have the potential to be a more complete and equally successful squad as their immediate predecessors.
Perhaps the best nonconference résumé in the ACC belongs to Louisville, which enters conference play with wins over Kentucky, Purdue, and Wichita State, and a lone loss to No. 4 Baylor by three in the Battle 4 Atlantis championship. The Cardinals will be able to prove their worth as a championship contender in the next week and a half as they open league play against Virginia and on the road at Notre Dame, with a neutral-court tilt against Indiana sandwiched in the middle.
Virginia’s lack of offensive production and a quality win have many claiming that this is the year the Cavaliers finally take a step back in the ACC, but Tony Bennett has heard that before. UVA has a way of being a thorn in the side of every other team in the conference, and a less experienced group of Cavs figure to get better on both ends of the court as the season progresses. It feels as if Virginia winning yet another ACC title would shock the college hoops world, but it shouldn’t.
4. Notre Dame: the “sleeper”
Don’t be surprised if Notre Dame is in the thick of the ACC title race far deeper into the season than anyone is predicting right now. The reason? Look at the Fighting Irish’s schedule. They have to play Louisville and Florida State twice, but the Fighting Irish have dominated the Cardinals in South Bend over the years, and the Seminoles have a recent habit of underachieving in ACC play. Notre Dame’s other two mirror opponents are Boston College and Georgia Tech, meaning they get four games against the teams that most expect to finish last and next-to-last in the league.
Of course, the schedule isn't the only thing Notre Dame has going for it. The Irish enter league play with experience, a double-double machine in Bonzie Colson, and a 10-2 record. Mike Brey's team's only losses are narrow defeats to No. 1 Villanova and No. 15 Purdue, and the only one of its 10 victories that came by single digits was a 70-66 neutral-court win over a Northwestern team that appears poised to make its first NCAA Tournament.
5. Coaches in the hot seat
The next couple of months are just a tad bigger for a handful of the league’s coaches than they are for those coaches’ counterparts.
Topping that list is Clemson's Brad Brownell, who is one of just three power conference coaches who has missed the NCAA Tournament in each of the last five seasons and still managed to keep his job. (Washington's Lorenzo Romar and Penn State's Pat Chambers are the others.) If Brownell is unable to get a talented group of Tigers headlined by All-American candidate Jaron Blossomgame over the hump and into the field of 68, then his sixth season at Clemson is likely to be his last.
Feeling heat for a different reason is Jim Christian at Boston College. Christian knew he was taking over the biggest rebuilding project in the ACC when he made the move to Chestnut Hill, but the lack of any sort of progress three years later has Eagles fans restless. BC enters ACC play riding a 20-game conference losing streak and expected by most to finish at the bottom of the league’s standings for a second straight year. If that happens, Brad Bates may decide that three seasons of embarrassment is enough.
The king of the ACC hot-seat conversation remains Florida State's Leonard Hamilton not because he's the league coach most likely to get canned, but because he's seemingly been in the conversation for the past decade without anything ever happening. Hamilton has a roster with three potential NBA draft picks in Dwayne Bacon, Jonathan Isaac, and Xavier Rathan-Mayes. He also has a 12-1 record that includes quality wins over Florida and Minnesota. If he can't take these things and turn them into the Seminoles' first NCAA Tournament appearance since 2012, there likely will be a serious conversation in Tallahassee about the program's direction.
Exceeding, or at least meeting, preseason expectations would also be wise career moves for Danny Manning at Wake Forest and Mark Gottfried at NC State.
10 dates you should have circled
Dec. 28 — Virginia at Louisville
Jan. 7 — NC State at North Carolina
Jan. 10 — Duke at Florida State
Jan. 14 — Duke at Louisville
Feb. 9 — North Carolina at Duke
Feb. 11 — Florida State at Notre Dame
Feb. 12 — Virginia at Virginia Tech
Feb. 15 — Duke at Virginia
Feb. 18 — Virginia at North Carolina
Feb. 22 — Louisville at North Carolina
March 4 — Duke at North Carolina/Notre Dame at Louisville/Pittsburgh at Virginia
Projected all-conference teams
First Team
G Dennis Smith Jr., NC State
G Joel Berry II, North Carolina
F Jayson Tatum, Duke
F Jaron Blossomgame, Clemson
F Michael Young, Pittsburgh
Second Team
G Luke Kennard, Duke
G Dwayne Bacon, Florida State
F Jamel Artis, Pittsburgh
F Bonzie Colson, Notre Dame
F Amile Jefferson, Duke
Third Team
G Grayson Allen, Duke
G Donovan Mitchell, Louisville
F Zach LeDay, Virginia Tech
F Justin Jackson, North Carolina
F V.J. Beachem, Notre Dame
Projected order of finish
1. Duke (15-3)
2. North Carolina (13-5)
3. Louisville (13-5)
4. Notre Dame (12-6)
5. Virginia (11-7)
6. NC State (10-8)
7. Florida State (10-8)
8. Pittsburgh (9-9)
9. Clemson (9-9)
10. Virginia Tech (9-9)
11. Miami (9-9)
12. Syracuse (6-12)
13. Wake Forest (5-13)
14. Georgia Tech (3-15)
15. Boston College (1-17)
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