Jim Phillips – ACC to meet about changing men’s hoops narrative

GREENVILLE, S.C. — ACC commissioner Jim Phillips told ESPN Saturday he will meet with his league’s men’s basketball coaches and athletic directors as soon as the season ends to discuss ways to be more “proactive” and “aggressive” in changing the narrative surrounding the conference.

The ACC only got five bids this season to the NCAA men’s tournament, a big disappointment to both Phillips and those inside his league. He remains steadfast in his belief that Clemson and North Carolina should have made the tournament.

Though conferences like the Big Ten and SEC got more bids (eight each), the ACC remains standing with Miami advancing to the Elite Eight.

“We have to portray ourselves in a different way and maybe it’s our scheduling, maybe it’s our providing information back to the committee, but we’re going to be aggressive in how we look at it — but we’re also going to be proactive,” Phillips said. “We feel the narrative hasn’t been quite right the last two years. We’re going to try to do something about that in the offseason.

“I get it, I’ve been on the men’s selection committee. I’ve been on the women’s committee. It’s a hard assignment, and so we’re going to try to make it easier for them from an ACC standpoint to make sure we’re structured and set up in a way where we will have more teams in the tournament in the future based on merit.”

The same thing happened to the ACC last season, when the league also received five bids. This is the first time since the league expanded to 15 teams in 2013 that it’s gone back-to-back seasons with only five tournament bids. Eight ACC teams, meanwhile, made the women’s tournament.

Phillips believe the men’s basketball selection committee has become too reliant on the NET rankings to evaluate teams, rather than just evaluating teams based on the way they play.

“We’re paying too much attention to the NET. I’m just not there on that,” Phillips said. “It does not reward teams that play 20 conference games versus 18 or less, and so that’s one of the things I’m hopeful in the future we don’t spend more time on or put more credence to it. I think it deserves less. In the end, the greatest thing we have in that committee is the eye test, and I think that’s been ignored. Go sit down and watch these games and watch who the best players are. I know the committee does that. I understand how that goes, but in the end, I don’t feel that has really resonated the last two years with our teams.”

Despite the five bids last year, the ACC had three teams advance to the Elite Eight and two make it to the Final Four — a fact Phillips points to when discussing the way the narrative about the conference doesn’t fit the…