The ACC has announced the conference opponents for the 2026-27 basketball season, and the Deacs came out with a pretty favorable schedule. As a reminder, the ACC moved to 18 conference games a season ago, and set up a schedule where each team plays 2 teams twice, 14 teams once, and 1 team not at all.
The good news for Wake Forest is that Notre Dame is one of the teams they get twice, while they miss out
on playing Virginia all together. Notre Dame finished last season 4-14 in the ACC and had a pretty similar offseason to the Deacs, losing their top 3 scorers in the transfer portal. Virginia, on the other hand, was the 2nd best team in the conference last season at 15-3 and retained all 10 of their players with remaining eligibility. Wake will also get all 3 Big Four opponents at home next season. In a system with unbalanced schedules, that is about as favorable an outcome as a team can get.
The down side of the schedule is road games against all 3 of the more distant ACC teams: Cal, Stanford and SMU. That likely means a week long west coast trip and another long trip out to Texas. These games usually give a much greater home court advantage to the home team, and can often impact the away team in their next game as well. Despite that, I think Wake clearly has a better chance of winning road games in Palo Alto and Berkley than they do in Chapel Hill or Durham, so this is still a pretty good trade off in my eyes.
The Deacs may need all the help they can get next season, and, at first glance, the schedule seems like its doing its part.
Go Deacs!
