The Atlantic Coast Conference has been lackluster at best for most of the last five men’s basketball seasons. The league has not earned more than five NCAA Tournament bids since 2021 and has not produced
more than two top-four seeds since 2019. For a conference that built its reputation on March dominance, that is a long slide.
This season feels different. With several new coaches and seemingly revived programs, the ACC entered 2025–26 with the expectation that it would finally look like a power league again. Two months in, the evidence says it has delivered.
ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips quietly made one of the most important decisions of the offseason when he returned to an 18-game conference schedule for the first time since 2018–19. That change freed teams to schedule more marquee non-conference games. The gamble was simple: trade a few extra league games for more chances to beat quality opponents and grow the ACC’s reputation with the committee.
So far, it has worked.
Last season, ACC teams went just 17–51 against power-conference (B10, B12, SEC, & Big East) opponents across the non-conference schedule. Quadrant 1 games were a nightmare: a combined 10–50 record. Only six teams finished inside the NET top 75. The ACC could point to Duke, who would go onto be a No.1 seed and Final Four team, but the overall conference profile was lacking.
This year’s numbers tell a different story.
Across the 2025–26 non-conference slate, ACC teams are 38–39 against P5 opponents, essentially playing even with the rest of the power structure. In Quadrant 1 games, the league is 16–31, still below water, but far more respectable. There are four teams in the top 30 of the NET compared to three last season. There are seven ACC squads ranked from 31-75, up from four last year.
That is 11 teams in the top 75 (up from six in 2024-25), almost three quarters of the league, with Stanford just missing the cut at No.76.
It’s no surprise, then, that ESPN’s December 16 Bracketology projects eight ACC teams in the NCAA tournament field. If that holds, it would be the conference’s largest haul since 2018 and a very obvious sign that the selection committee once again views ACC wins as valuable currency.
Virginia is not just riding this wave. It is one of the reasons the tide has turned.
A year ago, the Cavaliers stumbled to a 15–17 record with a 7–5 non-conference mark that did nothing to help the league’s case nationally. This season, under new head coach Ryan Odom and powered by a swath of new transfers, UVA has flipped the script. The Cavaliers are 11–1 with almost their entire non-conference slate complete – only a February 14 home date with Ohio State is still to come.
The Wahoos have earned their way back into the national conversation, sitting No. 21 in the AP Poll and No. 30 in the NET rankings. On top of that, Virginia delivered one of the ACC’s signature statement wins in the ACC/SEC Challenge, destroying Texas in a game that was never in doubt. That kind of decisive victory against a brand name opponent is exactly what the conference has lacked in recent seasons, and it raises the perceived value of every ACC game on Virginia’s schedule.
Virginia is part of a larger wave of improvement that has reshaped the top and middle of the league. The following ACC schools have all made meaningful jumps in the NET ranking.
• Miami: +190
• Virginia Tech: +111
• NC State: +102
• Cal: +82
• Virginia: +80
• Syracuse: +42
• Notre Dame: +21
Nothing summed up last year’s problems better than the 2024 ACC/SEC Challenge, when the SEC won 14–2 and most of those ACC losses came by double digits. It became a talking point that lasted all season.
This season did not flip the script entirely. The SEC still won, but only 9–7. ACC teams picked up a cluster of credible wins, and the blowouts mostly disappeared. When paired with the improved records against major conference opponents and the surge in NET top 75 teams, the challenge felt like a sign that the ACC is climbing back into national relevancy.
The ACC still has work to do. The conference is not yet matching the Big 12, Big Ten, or SEC blow for blow, and one decent non-conference season does not erase several years of underperformance.
But the numbers all point in the same direction.
For the first time in a while, ACC basketball is giving the selection committee a reason to take it seriously. For a program like UVA that is helping drive the turnaround, that shift in league perception may prove very important when it comes time for tournament seeding this March.
