The conference is coming off a historically bad season by its standards and is looking to beef up its nonconference performance
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ACC to reduce number of games in men's basketball conference schedule from 20 to 18 after multiple down years
The conference is coming off a historically bad season by its standards and is looking to beef up its nonconference performance
After more than a half-decade of experimentation with a 20-game schedule in men's basketball, the ACC is moving back to an 18-game conference slate for the 2025-26 season and beyond.
ACC athletic directors approved the switch on a league-wide call Wednesday morning, sources told CBS Sports. The conference played a 20-game schedule since 2019-20 (though it was shortened in 2020-21 due to COVID cancellations). The decision comes after lobbying was made in the past two years by some coaches and athletic directors to go back to 18. The ACC's disappointing 2024-25 season in men's hoops was an obvious catalyst in reversing course, sources said.
The league sent just four of its 18 teams to the 2025 NCAA Tournament, including North Carolina, which was controversially one of the final schools to make the cut. Four out of 18 equates to 22.2%, the lowest percentage of ACC teams to make the Big Dance since the tournament expanded to 64 in 1985.
Some upper-echelon programs — Duke chief among them — wanted to drop two games from the league schedule in an effort to avoid dead weight dragging down NCAA Tournament résumés. (Duke nevertheless overcame this, earning a No. 1 seed last season.) The more Quad 3 and Quad 4 games on a league schedule, the worse a conference's chances at more NCAA Tournament bids. The league expanded to 18 teams last season with the additions of Cal, Stanford and SMU.
Even in reducing the league slate, the solution for the ACC's woes lie in its nonconference performances — not its intra-conference schedule.
"You aren't going to fix the problem by going from 20 to 18," one source told CBS Sports. "The problem for the ACC is, a lot of these teams just haven't been good."
The ACC had the worst nonconference winning percentage of the five high-major leagues last season, and in fact was sub-.500 against top-100 teams for the fourth year in a row.
The ACC now wants to empower its coaches an opportunity to effectively swap out two conference games (whose résumé value is now unknowable) for two non-league contests that could mean more, statistically. Not every ACC team will win all of these games, of course, but the idea is to have ACC schools build up a stronger out-of-conference schedule and increase their chances of earning at-large bids to the NCAA Tournament.
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Just sayin': To accomplish greatness the ACC needs to play more "cupcakes"!!!
