New Kids On The Block And All-ACC Picks

For the most part we no longer view the ACC’s most recent expansion additions as foreign elements. They’re just Louisville, Notre Dame, Pitt and Syracuse, comprising 26.7 percent of the league’s membership.

And, lo and behold, in the five years since those four schools infested, we mean invested, the ACC they’ve produced an appropriate 26 percent of the players chosen first and second team all-conference. (Louisville arrived in 2015.)

On average the four schools had one player per year on the first team, although both last season and in 2016 they were shut out.

Syracuse leads the way with five of 50 top-10 selections to All-ACC squads as voted by the region’s sports media. Louisville and Notre Dame each had four players chosen first or second team. Pittsburgh had a single selection, Lamar Patterson, and he was on the second team in 2014.

Duke led all ACC schools with nine all-league picks in the past five years, including Marvin Bagley III and Wendell Carter Jr last season. Virginia was next with eight in five years, two in ’18. North Carolina and NC State tied Syracuse with five each.

Those five schools, one third of the league membership, accounted for 32 of the ACC’s top-10 picks since 2014. That’s 64 percent.

Perhaps surprisingly, the school that ranked sixth in all-conference talent over that span was Clemson. Brad Brownell’s often-underappreciated Tigers had three representatives among the top 50, including Marcquise Reed, a ’19 returnee, on last year’s second team.

Every ACC program had at least one all-conference selection since 2014.

Unfortunately reduced membership, more insular outlooks, and general slackness led the Atlantic Coast Sports Media Association to announce that, starting in 2018-19, it would forgo choosing an all-conference team. That breaks a long, quietly observed tradition, and leaves the voting to a group of coaches and school-oriented observers curated by the conference.