ACC Reportedly Considering Reducing Conference Schedule to Help March Madness Chances

The ACC is reportedly hoping to put itself in a position to be better-represented during March Madness in the future.

According to Brandon Marcello of CBS Sports, the ACC is considering reducing its conference schedule from 20 games to 18 "so teams can schedule more marquee nonconference games and improve the league's chances of landing more at-large teams in the NCAA Tournament."

Sources told Marcello that ACC commissioner Jim Phillips, the conference's athletics directors and ESPN have been in active discussions to make the change to the conference schedule as soon as the 2025-26 season. There is an expectation that the proposal "will be approved when the league's administrators meet in May for its annual spring meetings in Florida," Marcello reported.

The ACC played an 18-game schedule as recently as 2018-19 and expanded to 20 games the following year to support the launch of the ACC Network. As part of the 20-game schedule last season, each team played two repeat opponents. Sources told Marcello that the 18-game schedule would "consist of one game against 16 teams and two games against a permanent rival (home and away) each season."

This past season, the ACC sent just four teams to the NCAA Tournament, marking the lowest percentage in conference history at 22 percent. Duke was the only team to advance past the first round, making it to the Final Four before falling to Houston. KenPom.com ranked the ACC last in its ratings for the five high-major conferences.

The ACC has been pursuing ways to improve its product and metrics for quite some time now, but to no avail. The conference went 2-14 in last season's ACC-SEC challenge, causing a major hit to its strength of schedule.

"As a league, if you don't have a great out-of-conference (record), then mathematically, you can't move up," Miami athletics director Dan Radakovich told Marcello. "Your conference is pretty much set once you get to January."