ACC Basketball: Best realignment scenarios for each team if conference breaks up
By Joey Loose
Could major change be on the horizon in collegiate athletics yet again? Will there be another explosive round of conference realignment?
Recent reports indicate that several current members of the ACC are looking into new homes for their athletics programs. While nothing is concrete and nobody is currently leaving the conference, nearly half of the 15 teams in the ACC have been linked to other conferences and it could spell an issue for the league as a whole.
The ACC has a storied history in most of the major sports, especially with the success of some of the basketball programs. Duke and North Carolina are the best rivalry in college sports. Virginia recently won a national title. More recent conference additions like Louisville and Syracuse have immense basketball history, but could all of this come undone in the coming months?
The bottom line is that the landscape of college sports continues to change and that may be mean trouble for the ACC. The league ranks at the bottom among the five power conferences in media rights distribution. Unlike the Big Ten, Big 12, and SEC, the ACC has not added a new team to the league in recent years and could very easily be poached by those three conferences.
Rumors indicate that more than half a dozen of the programs currently in the conference could be looking for a way out of the league. If so many schools depart at once, this could mean the death of the ACC as we know it. If a slew of teams leave this league, there won’t be viable replacements and it likely spells the end of the conference.
Today, we’ll be looking at the best-case scenarios and potential futures for the 15 programs in ACC Basketball if the conference were to cease to exist. Clearly, several of these teams are already looking at these options, but others would be forced into a more uncomfortable position. There isn’t exactly open space for fifteen new teams to join three or four other leagues overnight. Let’s just get into where we feel like each of these programs could land in the future.