If the season ended today, the ACC would make the wrong kind of history. The conference -- which dominates the NCAA tournament record book for all-time appearances, winning percentage, No. 1 seeds and Final Four teams -- would equal its lowest bid total of the modern era.
The ACC got just three teams apiece in the 1999 and 2000 tournaments. With NC State sliding out of this year's projected field over the weekend and defending champion Virginia not quite back in (team No. 69 as of this writing), the ACC is again sitting on the possibility of only three entries for the 2020 bracket. All three -- Louisville, Duke and Florida State -- are good enough to play in April, but that won't help the remaining 80% of the teams as they sit by their televisions.
The landscape for all the power conferences changed prior to the 2013-14 season. Expanded membership, realignment and shifting selection committee priorities made monster bid totals the rule rather than the exception.
The Big 12 jammed two-thirds of its teams (40 of 60) into the NCAA bracket from 2014 through last season. In four of those six seasons, it placed seven of 10 members in the field. The Big East (.533) has also put over half its teams in the field since realignment, including the magic seven of 10 in 2017.
But what makes the current state of the ACC so alarming is that its overall membership -- 15 teams -- should make a three-team showing virtually impossible. The conference had only nine members when mustering three bids in 1999 and 2000. That's bad enough; three of 15 (.200) is unthinkable.
We don't have to go back very far to remember the levels of abuse heaped upon the Pac-12 -- three of 12 teams (.250) in 2018 and 2019 -- or the SEC, three of 14 teams (.214) in 2014 and 2016. If and when the ACC gets its number back to four for this season, the resulting bid percentage of .267 will still lag behind the four-bid Big Ten of two years ago (.286), considered by many to be the worst season in major conference history.
How did we get here? It's more than the singular oddity of North Carolina's irrelevance. After six years of averaging just under 30 wins, Virginia finally lost too much to overcome. Virginia Tech is rebuilding under a new coach. NC State, Clemson, Notre Dame and Miami can't get above .500 in an average league. And if we're being fair, Syracuse has been little more than a perennial bubble team for the majority of its ACC membership.
The bottom of the conference -- Wake Forest, Georgia Tech, Boston College and, until very recently, Pitt -- has become a serious drag on the middle. This year's Big Ten, for instance, has next to no bottom, so its bubble teams have exponentially more opportunities to build their NCAA résumés. And at 10 members apiece, the Big 12 and Big East also have little or no bottom, which helps cement their places among the top bid percentages of this postmodern era.
So while everyone extols North Carolina and the ACC's bigger names, the real issue is the continued erosion of the league's bottom third. Last year, three No. 1 seeds obscured the problem. This year, no one can miss it.