While I tend to revert to positivity over negativity, if I'm being honest, the Atlantic Coast Conference is in a rough spot, although Syracuse football certainly put forth a stellar 2024 season, going 10-3 overall and headed for a top-20 national finish.
Syracuse basketball, on the other hand, is struggling, to say the least. I voiced my frustration there in this column from Monday.
As the College Football Playoff ("CFP") heads toward its semifinal round later this week, the ACC in football laid a total egg during bowl season, going just 2-11 overall. The ACC's only two bowl triumphs came from Syracuse football, which beat Washington State in the Holiday Bowl late last month, and Louisville.
Conference bowl records entering @CFBPlayoff semis (ranked by win pct.)
— Brett McMurphy (@Brett_McMurphy) January 4, 2025
AAC 6-2
MAC 5-2
Big Ten 9-5
SEC 8-6
Sun Belt 4-3
Big 12 4-5
CUSA 1-4
MW 1-4
ACC 2-11
Pac-12 0-1
(Notre Dame 2-0, UConn 1-0)
Look, I get that bowl games don't have the same cache as they once did, given the transfer portal's explosion, opt-opts, NIL and other factors, as my brother Chuck Fiello articulated in a recent piece.
Still, 2-11 is pathetic. And the ACC got two of its members into the 12-team CFP, SMU as the No. 11 seed and Clemson as the No. 12 seed. Granted both of those schools had to play their opening-round CFP game on the road, but SMU fell by 28 points to No. 6 seed Penn State, while No. 5 seed Texas beat Clemson by two touchdowns.
Again, these are not good looks for the ACC, which is trying to keep up with the Big 12 Conference even as those two leagues trail the Big Ten Conference and the Southeastern Conference related to television revenue and the like.
For the Syracuse Orange and its ACC peers, things aren't looking so hot these days.
When the latest Associated Press top-25 poll in college basketball arrived on Monday, Duke checked in at No. 4 nationwide. The Blue Devils appear to be the ACC's top squad so far in the 2024-25 season, and Duke seems like a Final Four contender in the upcoming NCAA Tournament.
But the ACC, which has 18 members in collegiate hoops, doesn't have another team residing in the most recent AP top 25. Granted, Pittsburgh and Clemson are receiving votes.
When I glanced at the latest KenPom ratings, only Duke, at No. 2, is in the top 20. At the time of this writing, in the NCAA NET rankings, Duke was No. 2, Pittsburgh was No. 15 and no other ACC school was in the top 35.
The 2024-25 regular season still has a way to go, although via the Bracket Matrix Web site, it looks like the ACC could likely be in store for another Big Dance where it gets around five members invited, while other leagues receive significantly more bids.
Of course, should Duke or another ACC member do serious damage in the 2025 March Madness, that will kind of mask the current situation, which is this: on a national scale, the ACC simply isn't all that good, collectively, in basketball or football, from my perspective.
In hoops, Matt Norlander of CBS Sports recently went in-depth on this topic. He correctly notes that the ACC has been experiencing a massive changing of the guard related to its cadre of tremendous head coaches.
Gone are Jim Boeheim at Syracuse, Mike Krzyzewski at Duke, Roy Williams at North Carolina, Mike Brey at Notre Dame and, more recently, Tony Bennett at Virginia and now Jim Larrañaga at Miami. These are guys who won national championships and journeyed to many, many Final Fours between them.
Norlander writes: "The ACC losing so many famous faces and legendary achievers is especially damaging. It will take the league years to come back from its coaching brain drain. And that's not to say there aren't good coaches in the league now - there are - but there are so many unproven ones."
He adds, in part, that the ACC "has never been so underwhelming; it's in the midst of far and away its worst four-year stretch ever. It's the lowest-ranked high-major league in every metric. The conference has earned five NCAA bids apiece the past three seasons and might not even hit that mark in 2025."
Undeniably, Syracuse football is on an upward trajectory under head coach Fran Brown, while Syracuse basketball under head coach Adrian Autry has regressed so far in his second season at the helm of that program.
For the sake of our beloved Orange, I sincerely hope that the ACC improves its national standing sooner rather than later, especially amid ongoing conference realignment, the portal ascending to new heights, the evolution of NIL deals and future revenue-sharing.