After more than a half-decade of experimentation with a 20-game schedule in men’s basketball, the ACC is moving back to an 18-game conference slate for the 2025-26 season and beyond.
ACC athletic directors approved the switch on a league-wide call Wednesday morning, sources told CBS Sports. The conference played a 20-game schedule since 2019-20 (though it was shortened in 2020-21 due to COVID cancellations). The decision comes after lobbying was made in the past two years by some coaches and athletic directors to go back to 18. The ACC’s disappointing 2024-25 season in men’s hoops was an obvious catalyst in reversing course, sources said.
The league sent just four of its 18 teams to the 2025 NCAA Tournament, including North Carolina, which was controversially one of the final schools to make the cut. Four out of 18 equates to 22.2%, the lowest percentage of ACC teams to make the Big Dance since the tournament expanded to 64 in 1985.
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Some upper-echelon programs — Duke chief among them — wanted to drop two games from the league schedule in an effort to avoid dead weight dragging down NCAA Tournament résumés. (Duke nevertheless overcame this, earning a No. 1 seed last season.) The more Quad 3 and Quad 4 games on a league schedule, the worse a conference’s chances at more NCAA Tournament bids. The league expanded to 18 teams last season with the additions of Cal, Stanford and SMU.
Even in reducing the league slate, the solution for the ACC’s woes lie in its nonconference performances — not its intra-conference schedule.
“You aren’t going to fix the problem by…
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