ACC Returns to 18-Game Schedule for Men’s Basketball
Following over five years of testing a 20-game format, the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) will revert to an 18-game conference schedule starting in the 2025-26 season.
ACC athletic directors made this decision during a league-wide call on Wednesday, as reported by CBS Sports. The conference had implemented a 20-game schedule since the 2019-20 season, which was reduced in 2020-21 due to COVID-19 disruptions. This shift comes after two years of requests from coaches and athletic directors advocating for a return to the previous format. The disappointing performance of the ACC in the 2024-25 men’s basketball season was a significant factor in this decision.
Only four out of 18 teams from the ACC qualified for the 2025 NCAA Tournament, including the controversial selection of North Carolina as one of the final teams. This equates to a mere 22.2% qualification rate, the lowest for the ACC since the expansion of the tournament to 64 teams in 1985.
High-profile programs like Duke were particularly interested in reducing the number of conference games to prevent weaker opponents from negatively impacting their NCAA Tournament resumes. The more low-quality games (Quadrant 3 and 4) played in a league schedule, the less favorable it is for the conference’s overall chances in the tournament. The ACC added California, Stanford, and SMU to its ranks last season, bringing the total to 18 teams.
Despite the reduction in the number of conference games, experts agree that the ACC’s issues extend beyond its intra-conference schedule. It has been noted that simply moving from 20 to 18 games won’t resolve the league’s shortcomings, as many teams have not performed well in recent seasons.
Last season, the ACC recorded the worst nonconference winning percentage among the five major leagues and remained under .500 against top-100 teams for the fourth consecutive year. To bolster their chances of securing at-large NCAA bids, the ACC plans for teams to replace two conference games with two non-conference matchups that carry more statistical significance.
The new 18-game league schedule will entail each team playing two home-and-home series and 14 single-game matchups, with one team not facing another in a season. For instance, in the 2025-26 scenario for North Carolina, they would face Duke twice, possibly NC State twice, plus seven home games and seven road games against different ACC schools.
