The ACC became the latest truly national college sports conference Friday with its additions of Stanford, Cal and SMU. And while the league’s spanning from California to Boston may have been the right move from a pure survivalist perspective, it does come at a cost: weakening further what used to be one of the best men’s college basketball products around.
Current ACC members won nine of the 19 men’s basketball national titles from 2001 to ’19 (Louisville in ’13 and Syracuse in ’03 were members of other conferences at the time, though Maryland was an ACC member when it won its ’02 championship). The league won three of five titles from 2015 to ’19, ranked in the top three of KenPom’s conference rankings every year from 2014 to ’19 and has a deep, storied history in the sport.
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