ACC Basketball Feeling Impact
Of Legendary Coaching Turnover
By David Glenn
North Carolina Sports Network
Just eight years ago, the Atlantic Coast Conference had perhaps the greatest collection of coaches in the history of a legendary basketball league that is now playing its 72nd season.
By the 2016-17 campaign, Roy Williams (North Carolina), Mike Krzyzewski (Duke), Jim Boeheim (Syracuse) and Rick Pitino (Louisville), each still an active head coach at the time, already had been inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
Krzyzewski ultimately led the Blue Devils to five national championships, 15 ACC Tournament crowns and 13 regular-season titles. Williams took the Tar Heels to three NCAA titles, nine regular-season championships and three ACC Tournament triumphs. Pitino captured national championships at Kentucky and Louisville. Boeheim led the Orange to the 2003 NCAA title, plus 10 regular-season crowns and five tournament titles during their time in the Big East.
At the time, three additional ACC schools were led by head coaches who also could be considered the best in those programs’ respective histories: Tony Bennett (Virginia), Jim Larranaga (Miami) and Buzz Williams (Virginia Tech).
Bennett led the Cavaliers to their only national championship, in 2019, plus six ACC regular-season titles and their only ACC Tournament crowns (2014, 2018) since way back in 1976. Larranaga led the Hurricanes to two first-place ACC finishes, plus the only ACC Tournament title (2013) and the only Final Four trip (2023) in program history. Williams took the Hokies to three straight NCAA Tournaments and just the second Sweet 16 appearance (2019) in program history.
Meanwhile, at Notre Dame, coach Mike Brey was the winningest coach in that school’s well-decorated hoops history. In 2000, he took over a program that hadn’t made the NCAA Tournament in a full decade. Over the next 23 seasons, he led the Fighting Irish to 13 NCAA Tournament trips, three Sweet 16s, two Elite Eights and their only ACC championship (2015).
Just eight years ago, then, eight of the ACC’s 15 head coaches could have been classified, in different ways and to varying degrees, as living legends.
Unsurprisingly, in 2016-17, the ACC was an elite basketball conference.
UNC won the national championship. Duke, Louisville, Notre Dame, Florida State and Virginia also finished in the national Top 25. Under Williams, the Tar Heels also won the ACC regular-season crown. Under Krzyzewski, the Blue Devils captured the ACC Tournament. Miami, Virginia Tech and Wake Forest also made the NCAA Tournament, enabling the ACC to tie its all-time record with a whopping nine participants in the Big Dance.
Eight years later, all eight of those legendary head coaches are gone.
Eight years later, the ACC no longer looks like an elite basketball league.
There are other factors in play, too, but it doesn’t require a big leap of logic to tie those two developments together.
Instead of six teams in the Top 25, the current version of the ACC has only one (Duke).
Instead of a record nine NCAA Tournament participants, the league has only one elite team (Duke), two more (Clemson, Pitt) in a strong position thanks to both their caliber of play and multiple high-end nonconference victories, and two others (Louisville, UNC) that appear plenty capable of ending up on the right side of the bubble come Selection Sunday in March.
When the ACC was an eight- or nine-team league, back in the 1980s and 1990s, it averaged about five NCAA Tournament bids per year, meaning a majority of its membership. Now that it’s an 18-team league — literally twice the size of its old self — five bids to the Big Dance would be an embarrassment.
The conference’s dramatic, impactful coaching overhaul came gradually, and for a variety of reasons.
Williams (70), Krzyzewski (75), Boeheim (78) and Larranaga (75) were just old. They mentioned, to varying degrees, the dramatic changes (transfer portal, Name-Image-Likeness money, player agents, etc.) to college athletics in recent years, but they were all in their 70s when they retired, meaning they would have retired soon regardless of the state of the game.
Brey (now an NBA assistant coach) and Pitino (now the head coach at St. John’s) were forced out. Notre Dame made only one NCAA Tournament in Brey’s final six seasons and bottomed out with an 11-21 campaign in 2022-23. Louisville fired Pitino after the Cardinals were caught up in a pay-for-play NCAA scandal that came to light because of a federal investigation.
Bennett stepped down at UVa, on the eve of the 2024-25 season, at only 55 years old. Much like Wake Forest football coach Dave Clawson (57), one of the best in that program’s history, Bennett cited recent changes to the fundamental nature of college athletics as a primary reason for his exit at a relatively young age.
Finally, Williams’ departure from Virginia Tech for Texas A&M in 2019 perfectly symbolized perhaps the most alarming aspect of this ACC basketball story.
In the 1980s, 1990s and even early 2000s, the ACC was the wealthiest conference in America. The league’s eight or nine schools received annual checks (reflecting shared revenues such as television money, NCAA Tournament and bowl payouts, league sponsorship income, etc.) from the conference office that were the largest nationally on a per-school basis.
Those days are long gone, of course. The Big Ten and the Southeastern Conference both have zoomed past the ACC (and everyone else) on financial matters, mainly because those leagues’ much more lucrative TV deals reflect the undeniable fact that their football product consistently generates much larger average TV/streaming audiences than everyone else in the college marketplace, including the ACC.
Texas A&M, which has one of the largest athletic budgets in college sports, is now paying Williams about $4.5 million per season. He made roughly $2-3 million per year during his time at Virginia Tech, a similar amount to what the Hokies are paying coach Mike Young this season.
Making matters worse, four of Tech’s top players from last year were lured away by NIL money. Instead of starting for the Hokies this season, three are playing (and typically starting) for SEC teams. The other is starting at Miami.
Virginia Tech is one of the worst basketball teams in the ACC this year. Again, these developments definitely are related.
As the ACC’s 2024-25 campaign continues to unfold, and the league’s on-court results pale in comparison to what it has produced for most of its modern history, keep in mind that eight of its 18 head coaches are in their first or second year on the job.
Among those eight, only one — Pat Kelsey at Louisville — has the look of an NCAA Tournament contender.
Most of the rest appear destined for the extremely ugly bottom half of the newly expanded, 18-team ACC.
