The changing ACC basketball landscape

The college athletics landscape has drastically changed since the pandemic with the opening of the transfer portal, NIL and conference realignment. These changes have not necessarily been considered good for the game, particularly with coaches.

It’s created a world of chaos within college sports that isn’t for everybody. Coincidentally, the ACC has lost four coaches of teams that were superpowers in the conference within the last 10 years.

Roy Williams was the first domino to fall, retiring from North Carolina after the 2020-21 season. Mike Krzyzewski left the year after, followed by Jim Boeheim, again just one year later. Both coaches retired after over 40-year runs at Duke and Syracuse, respectively.

The latest domino was the abrupt retirement of Tony Bennett at Virginia, less than a month before the start of the season.

Williams, Krzyzewski and Boeheim are already in the Hall of Fame, and Bennett will be a lock to join them in the near future. You can certainly point to age for the first three as a factor as well as all three are in their 70s. Bennett retiring only at age 55 though sent a shockwave throughout college basketball, and the four retirements coming in consecutive years don’t seem like a coincidence.

Both Williams and Bennett stated in their retirement press conferences that they walked away because they no longer felt they were the right man for the job. While Williams didn’t specifically point to changes in the landscape of the sport, Bennett did.

He stated that he supports players being able to earn money, but the sport as a whole lacks structure, and he felt he was cut out for the old landscape, not the current one.

All four programs have promoted assistants under the former head coach to take over. North Carolina is now led by Hubert Davis, Duke has Jon Scheyer, Syracuse is now led by Adrian Autry, and Virginia just recently promoted Ron Sanchez.

It is worth noting that Sanchez is only an interim coach for the season. There’s a good chance he will end up being the permanent coach after the season, but Virginia didn’t have the chance to execute a full coaching search before this season, so they could make an outside hire after the season.

The other changes to the ACC involve the new additions. Cal has struggled in recent years, but Mark Madsen is only in his second year as head coach. Stanford and SMU enter their first year with first-year coaches who have both had recent success.

SMU brought in Andy Enfield from USC who before last season had made the NCAA Tournament three consecutive years, including reaching the Elite Eight in 2021.

Stanford welcomed Kyle Smith from Washington State after he led them to their first NCAA Tournament berth and victory since the aforementioned Tony Bennett was the coach in 2008.

On top of all the coaches mentioned above, there are multiple other ACC teams who have hired new coaches since the pandemic, so what direction is this conference headed?

North Carolina and Duke are college basketball bluebloods and are still thriving under new leadership, even after losing legends. Syracuse and Virginia also had to replace program legends, but they are unproven so far.

The two powerhouses in The Triangle region of North Carolina look to be the frontrunners in the conference again this year. But oh yeah, the other school in the region, NC State went to the Final Four last year. Don’t forget Clemson also made the Elite Eight last year.

Go back five years, and the ACC had consistently been the best conference in college basketball. With some of the new coaching hires, the conference could have that depth back again and go back to being the exciting conference it was in the 2010s.

Jacob Rudy is a second-year majoring in broadcast journalism. To contact him, email jar7371@psu.edu.