By R.L. Bynum
Remember the glory days of the classic ACC when it was eight teams, the league played a double round-robin in the regular season in basketball and the tournament lasted three days?
Those days ended when the league raided the Big East in 2013. But that seems like ancient history after the ACC added Stanford, Cal and SMU on Friday for the 2024–25 school year.
The ACC basketball tournaments became five-day events when the league expanded to 15 teams and could stretch to six days when there are 18 teams for the 2025 tournaments.
ACC commissioner Jim Phillips said on a teleconference Friday afternoon that the league hasn’t decided how to structure the tournament once it expands.
“We have not made any decisions on the basketball tournament,” Phillips said. “I think there’s a lot of options.
“I want to ask the membership, I want to ask the coaches what they think and the athletic directors about how you set that tournament up,” Phillips said. “Do we want to have all 18 and do it over a six-day period instead of five-day period? We look forward to doing that.”
The ACC hasn’t announced the site for either the men’s or the women’s tournament after 2024, leaving the possibility of the tournament going west.
Years ago, nobody would have envisioned an ACC men’s tournament staged in Brooklyn, but it’s happened three times. Could the event head to Las Vegas, San Francisco or Dallas?
“In the end, I think you’ve got to always remember where your home bases are, where you’ve had an awful lot of success,” said Phillips, who didn’t directly address possible West Coast sites. “And that has been in the state of North Carolina, with being Greensboro and Charlotte. But we also have gone up to Barclays in Brooklyn, and we’ve gone up to D.C. So we will look at that, and we’ll make some determinations coming up on location.”
For the 2025 ACC tournament to include all 18 teams, the play-in game — known informally for years as the Les Robinson game — will likely be revived. Since N.C. State was the school that flipped its vote to make this latest expansion possible, that name should also be revived.
Unless the league has another plan, the men’s tournament would start on Monday and the women’s tournament on Tuesday with a play-in game. The teams in that game would have to win six games in as many days to capture the ACC title.
“I think it’s got some tremendous, exciting options for us as we as we look at both men’s and women’s basketball,” Phillips said.
That play-in game winner would advance to the first round (Tuesday for the men and Wednesday for the women). The first round would include four games for the first time since the field expanded in 2014.
If the league goes with that format, the tournaments will, for the first time, have 16 games.
From 1972 (after South Carolina left the league) to 1978 (the year before the ACC added Georgia Tech), the men’s tournament in the Greensboro Coliseum included only six games because there were only seven teams. The regular-season champion earned a bye into the semifinals and there were three quarterfinals games.
Those were the days. The tournament was almost always in Greensboro and took only three days.
Now we’ll likely be back to a play-in game in the men’s tournament for the first time since the stretch from 1992 until 2004, after the ACC added Florida State and before Miami and Virginia Tech joined the league.
The expansion is all about money and football. It certainly had nothing to do with the league’s basketball tradition.
Photos courtesy of the ACC
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