Is expansion good for ACC men’s college basketball?

We’ve had over a month to digest the news that the ACC will add Cal, Stanford and SMU as members beginning in 2024-25. From the proverbial 30,000-foot perspective, the move appears a win-win for the schools and for the conference.

After navigating a nerve-wracking month where the Pac-12 had already imploded, Cal and Stanford managed to secure landing spots in a storied conference. As for SMU, it’s happily returning to the top tier of Division I, almost 40 years after the NCAA slapped the Mustangs football program with the death penalty.

For its part, the ACC is beefing up its membership in case, say, a Florida State, North Carolina and/or Clemson might someday decide to seek greener pastures. (All of the above reportedly voted against the expansion.) The new members also add media markets in the Bay Area and Texas to the ACC footprint.

These would be fundamental considerations for any major conference. Besides, with the Big Ten and Big 12 raiding the Pac-12 (and the SEC having already locked up Texas and Oklahoma), standing pat may have been the path of greater risk for the ACC. Expanding was a logical move for the league.

And yet, purely in terms of the league’s men’s basketball programs, this particular expansion brings some degree of risk.

Potential for a lopsided ACC

As foolhardy as it may seem, assume for the moment that we can look one year ahead and know what the major conferences will look like in 2024-25. What will we see?

The old Pac-12 has dispersed. UCLA, USC, Oregon and Washington are in the Big Ten. Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah play in the Big 12.

Cal and Stanford, along with SMU, are in the ACC. While the Bears and Cardinal have national championship banners (from 1959 and 1942, respectively) and the Mustangs reached a Final Four (in 1956), these peak performances date to the distant past.

More recently, the trio collectively has not won an NCAA tournament game since 2014. Cal and SMU rank near the bottom of the nation’s (current or soon-to-be) major conference programs in terms of performance over the past five seasons. For that matter, current ACC members like Boston College, Wake Forest, Pitt and Georgia Tech are in much the same statistical boat.

Which means in a year’s time the ACC will have six members that, for now, rank among the bottom 12 nationally for performance over the past five seasons.

Naturally, the past five years can’t provide an infallible map…