132: Not your father's ACC
ACC men's hoops trends, putting a time stamp on fouls, and remember concerts at the Dean Dome.
It’s Joey Brackets time.
The four words you don’t want to hear when watching a college basketball game.
Joey Brackets or Joe Lunardi joined the North Carolina-Syracuse broadcast last week to discuss the ACC. He explained that the league only has three teams locked into the NCAA Tournament and expects only four, maybe five, total bids.
Lunardi declared:
“Let’s face it, this is not your father’s ACC.”
And I regret to inform you, that Lunardi is right1.
ACC men’s basketball is as weak as its ever been. Six seasons ago, the conference had three No. 1 overall seeds in the 2019 NCAA Tournament. Fast forward to today, and nine of the league’s 18 teams have a record of .500 or worse through February 19 games.
Decades of data to back it up
Lunardi’s statement isn’t anecdotal. This is supported by decades of data.
Since the NCAA Tournament expanded to 64 teams in the 1985 season2, let's examine two key metrics:
The percentage of ACC teams that made the NCAA Tournament each season
The percentage of ACC teams that finished with a .500 regular season record or worse
Between 1985 and 2018, only one season (2001-02) saw 40 percent or more of ACC teams finish at .500 or worse. In the past seven seasons, that’s happened four times.
The ACC's NCAA tournament representation has declined compared to other power conferences too. While the Big 12 and SEC have consistently sent over 50 percent of their teams to the tournament in the past two seasons, and the Big Ten sent ~57 percent one season ago, the ACC has managed only five of its 15 teams (~33 percent) in each of the last two seasons.
Though the conference can still boast about having representatives in four of the last five Final Fours, the broader health of the league is a legitimate concern.
The Expansion Problem
The ACC's expansion to 18 teams hasn't strengthened the league. It's diluted it.
Less than 30 percent of the league is expected to receive a bid to the NCAA Tournament this season. Why?
The ACC’s non-conference struggles are the primary issue. The league has won only 23.5 percent of its games against other power conferences this season3.
The conference's geographic footprint now stretches to the Pacific coast, yet its competitive footprint continues to shrink.
So, how does the ACC fix it?
A few weeks ago, former Georgia Tech head coach Josh Pastner joined the Carolina Insider Pod and shared a couple drastic ideas.
Play every team round-robin (30+ conference games) and limit the non-conference slate to three games
Play conference games in November and play non-conference in December or January
Last week, I wrote about the seasonal distribution of games and how about 99 percent of non-conference games are played before January 1. Pastner makes a good point, the league’s tournament metrics are already baked in by January.
The core issue is obvious. The league is too big. I don’t suspect the ACC is going to contract teams, so it should at least try to embrace creative scheduling strategies.
Here are some galaxy brain ideas:
Don’t prefix the complete league schedule, leave the last three weeks of the league schedule open and dynamically schedule the games based on results from earlier in the season
Partner with another league (Big East, SEC) and follow the same two round challenge format that the Sun Belt and MAC use this season
Create a preseason ACC tournament for all 18 teams with a winner’s and loser’s bracket, and award the winner an automatic spot and bye in the postseason ACC tournament
Limit the postseason ACC tournament to only the top nine teams, and make it a winner’s and loser’s bracket to guarantee extra games for the top quality teams
Implement a promotion/relegation system within the conference by dividing into two or three divisions
Revive the Big Four Tournament
Are any of these good ideas? Maybe.
Are any of these ideas actually going to happen? Probably not.
Are you still reading? Thanks.
But the point is that the ACC won't get better by all of us just talking about how bad it has become. It's time to consider different scheduling options.
Carolina’s Frequent fouler
Speaking of challenges, let's talk about one of North Carolina's most polarizing players. Elliot Cadeau shows flashes of brilliance with pin-point passes one possession followed by confounding negative plays on the next possession. Many of these negative plays revolve around Cadeau's propensity for foul trouble.
Through February 19 games, Cadeau has committed 25 more fouls than any other Carolina player. Cadeau is averaging 4.1 fouls per 40 minutes and 2.6 fouls per game over his 64 game career, using data from sports-reference.com.
Cadeau has been whistled for 168 fouls in his two seasons at Carolina (64 games). As an unfair, but alarming comparison, former Carolina great Ed Cota committed 176 fouls in his entire 138 game career.
This prompted me to try and answer the question: when does Cadeau commit fouls?
If we look at the play-by-play for this season, we find 12 of Cadeau’s 84 fouls have come within the first five minutes of game time. While 13 of the fouls occurred in the first five minutes of the second half, and nearly 36 percent of the fouls called on Cadeau happen in the final 10 minutes of the game.
The table below shows a list of all fouls per game with the timestamps of when these occur, and the fouls in the first five minutes are highlighted.
These early fouls are especially costly given North Carolina’s coaching tendencies. Ken Pomeroy tracks 2-Foul Participation or the percentage of time that a starter with two fouls in the first half has been allowed to play.
North Carolina ranks 225th out of 363 D-I teams, allowing starters to play only 16.6 percent of available minutes in the first half with two fouls. Given Cadeau's consistent foul trouble4 throughout games, the coaching staff's caution seems warranted.
As Cadeau's collegiate career continues, the talented guard will need to find a way to balance his aggressiveness without collecting whistles.
Thanks for reading this far
That’s it for this week. If you’re curious, check out the code to put together the charts in this post.
As a closing thought, I’ve been following how North Carolina is leaning towards building a new basketball arena at an off campus Carolina North location instead of renovating the current Dean E. Smith Center.
While the debate about the decision will continue, I think we're missing an opportunity to document the Smith Center's remarkable history as an actual venue.
For example, Performance Magazine named the Dean E. Smith Center the Venue-of-the-year in 1987. Before the Smith Center closes, the school should consider producing a documentary or oral history that captures not just its basketball legacy, but its role as a major concert venue - like hosting the Grateful Dead in 1993.
🤟 Happy Friday, and feel free to subscribe if you haven’t already done so. 🤟
What have I become? As exhausting as the ACC discourse has been over the past few seasons, I think this is the season everyone is understanding it’s an actual problem.
NCAA Tournament expanded to 64 teams for the 1985 season. The 2020 season calculations use regular season records as of March 11, 2020, projecting five total bids based on bracketology ratings. As of this season, we’re using regular season records through February 19 games and projecting four total bids to the Big Dance. This can obviously change, but I would expect no more than five or six total bids.
Duke has a chance to make the league’s 17-52 overall against power conferences this season. The Blue Devils play Illinois in Madison Square Garden Saturday night, and it’s yet another way Duke is showing its ahead of the curve.
The next logical step with this analysis is actually categorizing the type of fouls with video, and then reviewing the officials that have worked these games.