ACC to reduce number of games in men’s basketball conference schedule from 20 to 18 after multiple down years

After more than a half-decade of experimentation with a 20-game schedule in men’s basketball, the ACC is moving back to an 18-game conference slate for the 2025-26 season and beyond.

ACC athletic directors approved the switch on a league-wide call Wednesday morning, sources told CBS Sports. The conference played a 20-game schedule since 2019-20 (though it was shortened in 2020-21 due to COVID cancellations). The decision comes after lobbying was made in the past two years by some coaches and athletic directors to go back to 18. The ACC’s disappointing 2024-25 season in men’s hoops was an obvious catalyst in reversing course, sources said. 

The league sent just four of its 18 teams to the 2025 NCAA Tournament, including North Carolina, which was controversially one of the final schools to make the cut. Four out of 18 equates to 22.2%, the lowest percentage of ACC teams to make the Big Dance since the tournament expanded to 64 in 1985.

Some upper-echelon programs — Duke chief among them — wanted to drop two games from the league schedule in an effort to avoid dead weight dragging down NCAA Tournament résumés. (Duke nevertheless overcame this, earning a No. 1 seed last season.) The more Quad 3 and Quad 4 games on a league schedule, the worse a conference’s chances at more NCAA Tournament bids. The league expanded to 18 teams last season with the additions of Cal, Stanford and SMU. 

Even in reducing the league slate, the solution for the ACC’s woes lie in its nonconference performances — not its intra-conference schedule.

“You aren’t going to fix the problem by going from 20 to 18,” one source told CBS Sports. “The problem for the ACC is, a lot of these teams just haven’t been good.”

The ACC had the worst nonconference winning percentage of the five high-major leagues last season, and in fact was sub-.500 against top-100 teams for the fourth year in a row.

The ACC now wants to empower its coaches an opportunity to effectively swap out two conference games (whose résumé value is now unknowable) for two nonleague contests that could mean more, statistically. Not every ACC team will win all of these games, of course, but the idea is to have ACC schools build up a stronger out-of-conference schedule and increase their chances of earning at-large bids to the NCAA Tournament.

As for the 18-game league schedule, sources said the ACC is planning to have every team’s intra-conference slate involve two home-and-homes, 14 single-game matchups and one “zero-play,” meaning every ACC team will play 16 opponents each season moving forward instead of all 17. 

For example, a hypothetical for the 2025-26 season involving North Carolina: The Tar Heels will play Duke twice. The second home-and-home could be NC State. After those four games, there would be seven home games and seven road games against 14 other ACC schools, with one school not on the schedule. The ACC will build its schedule in the summer and release it in the fall.

The league’s decision comes after the SEC shattered the record for most bids by a conference, earning 14 NCAA Tournament tickets and sending seven teams to the Sweet 16, including national champion Florida. In contrast, nine of the ACC’s 18 teams finished outside the top 100 in the NET. Eight were outside the top 100 at KenPom.com. It was the most non-top-100 teams at KenPom by a major conference in history.

For decades, the ACC was considered a top-two conference year over year in basketball, but the past five seasons have brought a stark downturn. From 2021 through 2025, the league has finished fifth, fifth, seventh, fifth and fifth in overall league strength at KenPom, making it the worst power conference in men’s hoops in that span. Despite the top-to-bottom underperformance, the ACC has still managed to make noise in the NCAA Tournament thanks to deep runs: North Carolina and Duke both made the Final Four in 2022, while Miami went that far in 2023. NC State’s dream run to the national semis was a memorable part of the 2024 NCAAs, and top-seeded Duke’s push to the Final Four last season also got the ACC to the ultimate stage yet again.

The ACC joins the SEC and Big 12 having an 18-game league schedule. The 11-team Big East and 18-team Big Ten are at 20. Sources said no additional changes to Power Five conference scheduling size are expected through the end of the decade.