If not for the cancelled NCAA Tournament and COVID, the ACC’s struggles could’ve very well been the storyline of the offseason in college basketball.
As you recall, the league was basically four-deep last year with Florida State, Duke, Virginia and Louisville as the lone teams on secure footing in March. North Carolina had cratered. Notre Dame and NC State were on the bubble. Syracuse was on the outside looking in. Nearly half the conference won seven or fewer ACC games.
Without March Madness to confirm or refute the assumptions that the league had taken a major step backward, all 15 teams and the ACC as a whole got to avoid the potential reckoning that could’ve otherwise arrived.