2025 All-ACC Basketball Honors:
Suggestions From A 38-Year Voter
By David Glenn
North Carolina Sports Network
When in doubt, celebrate greatness.
That’s been one of my most important and reliable rules of thumb since 1988, the first time I voted on Atlantic Coast Conference basketball honors.
Often, the votes are obvious (e.g., Duke freshman Cooper Flagg for both Player of the Year and Rookie of the Year this time), but every March there are some close calls.
Occasionally, there are two or more perfectly deserving candidates for an individual award, and I think that’s the case for at least one of the most prominent ACC honors (i.e., Coach of the Year) here in 2025. The ballot, whether paper in the old days or online for decades now, will accept only one name for each of those categories, of course.
I personally directed the (independent) All-ACC voting for the ACC Sports Journal and ACCSports.com for more than 20 years, while also participating in the official voting, which is now done by a combination of the league’s 18 head coaches and 72 media members. Each voter has his or her own logic or approach, but they typically combine into a clear consensus.
While there are nonsensical ballots cast every year (I’ve seen them with my own eyes), they almost always are drowned out and made irrelevant by the more objective, knowledgeable, paying-attention, level-headed, we-watch-more-than-one-team-regularly majority.
The only times I’ve felt something beyond polite disagreement with an actual award winner came when mediocrity — rather than something truly great — was celebrated by voters. There is always a better option. Always.
For example, since 1975, all but two ACC Players of the Year have come from a team that was in position to play in the NCAA Tournament at the time of the vote. (Remember, votes are due the weekend before the ACC Tournament begins, and thus well before Selection Sunday.) Similarly, since the NCAA Tournament lifted its one-team-per-league rule in 1974, only a few ACC Coach of the Year honors have gone to men whose teams ended up missing the Big Dance.
When the media, over my and many others’ objections, gave the Player of the Year honor to Erick Green of last-place Virginia Tech in 2013, the coaches (who voted separately back then) voted instead for point guard Shane Larkin of first-place Miami, which went on to win the ACC title.
Green was a wonderful player, but he was putting up huge numbers in mostly meaningless games, away from the pressure that comes with the spotlight. Larkin’s numbers weren’t nearly as impressive, but his high-level production was central to his team’s high-level success.
Similarly, Georgia Tech coach Josh Pastner won the 2017 ACC Coach of the Year honor … after finishing 11th in a 15-team league! The Yellow Jackets’ 8-10 conference record definitely was better than the media projected for them in the preseason that year, and that was a nice accomplishment and an admirable story.
However, there were six ACC coaches who built top-25 teams that year. None of those guys was more deserving of such special, historical recognition? Indeed, most of them were.
When voters kowtow to the you’re-not-as-horrible-as-we-guessed-months-ago mindset, rather than being equally as alert for great coaching jobs among the more prominent teams, you sometimes end up with ridiculous results.
For example, Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski, one of the greatest coaches in basketball history, had more National Coach of the Year awards (six) than ACC Coach of the Year honors (five). Over the last 22 years of his career, during which he had five ACC regular-season titles and 18 top-three finishes, he didn’t win the league’s coaching honor even once.
Next: My 2025 All-ACC ballot (Part One).
