The Atlantic Coast and Southeastern conferences are southern-footprint neighbors best known for different long-running strengths: the ACC with rich men’s basketball tradition, the SEC in football.
These days, the SEC has veered into the ACC’s lane.
As the third ACC/SEC Challenge begins Tuesday, the SEC is coming off a year with a record haul of 14 NCAA Tournament bids, two Final Four teams and Florida winning the national championship.
The ACC, meanwhile, has been grappling with how to jumpstart a flagship sport facing a dwindling number of tournament bids. The SEC’s rise has magnified that concern and presented the ACC an opportunity to help its case.
In a recent interview with The Associated Press, ACC commissioner Jim Phillips was pleased with his league’s start to the 2025-26 season. That echoed preseason optimism in another AP interview, where he cited school's enhanced investments and efforts to improve scheduling toward boosting tournament-worthy resumes.
“To me, we’ve righted the ship and we’re headed in a really good direction, we really are,” Phillips said. “For whatever reason, we’ve had that dip. But you talk about longevity, what our league has done is pretty sensational.”
This week
Indeed, that record is unquestioned. The pressing concern is what’s next, starting this week.
After the leagues split 14 games in 2023, the SEC won last year’s first nine games while its 14 wins came by an average 13.4 points.
The SEC enters this week with a national-best seven AP Top 25 teams, the ACC with three. That leaves No. 4 Duke hosting No. 15 Florida, No. 6 Louisville visiting No. 25 Arkansas, and No. 16 North Carolina visiting No. 18 Kentucky as marquee matchups.
“They’re certainly talking points, we can’t really control that,” first-year Virginia coach Ryan Odom said after last week's win against Queens. “Ultimately we have to do our part within the games. It is what it is: We have to win — we being the ACC — and win as many games as we can.”
SEC’s rise
The SEC’s upward trajectory began after Greg Sankey took over as commissioner for the 2015-16 sports season, when the league had three NCAA bids for the third time in four seasons.
Sankey hired former Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese as a consultant as one of his first calls in reshaping the SEC’s approach to the sport, which included pushing more investments in facilities and coaching hires.
Within two years, the SEC had a league-record eight bids. Last year it had a tournament-record seven Sweet 16 teams, breaking the ACC’s 2016 record of six.
“To really watch the progression and grow from my time at Auburn, it went from a league that got three teams in 2013 to obviously having the greatest season in the history of college basketball,” Auburn first-year coach Steven Pearl said, “the best conference in the history of college basketball.”
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ACC transitions
The ACC had a league-record nine NCAA bids in 2017 and 2018, but things have gone south since. Seven bids in 2021 became five from 2022-24, then four last year — the fewest since getting four in 2013 as a 12-team conference.
Worse, that drop has come amid transition from seismic coaching changes. Notably, there were retirements of Hall of Famers Roy Williams at UNC (2021), Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski (2022) and Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim (2023), and other longtime fixtures like Notre Dame’s Mike Brey, Florida State’s Leonard Hamilton and Miami’s Jim Larrañaga.
As a result, the average coaching tenure at ACC schools has dropped from 13.47 years in 2020-21 to 4.06 now with four new coaches. By comparison, the SEC’s average has barely moved (4.86 in 2020-21, 3.69 in 2025-26), while Clemson’s Brad Brownell (18th season) is the longest-tenured coach in either league.
Changing course
It’s an added test as the ACC has been working to counter a continued revenue gap behind the Big Ten and SEC.
That meant trying to bolster football as the revenue-generating engine in college athletics — though perhaps the ACC also lost some focus on the men’s basketball programs that had been a calling-card strength.
“I think all that TV money, (the SEC) took advantage of it and at one point decided ‘We need to improve basketball, there’s no reason why we can’t have good basketball teams, too,’” Brownell said in preseason. “I’m sure investment is a part of that.
“We’ve tried to improve our football league a great deal. Has basketball gone down because of that? I don’t know, but there is only so much money at some point with schools and you’ve got to make decisions. I’m sure some of that has happened.”
The SEC has had 36 NCAA bids for the past four tournaments, nearly double the ACC’s total of 19. The silver lining for the ACC is its tournament teams tend to stick around; no league has more Elite Eight (eight) and Final Four (five) appearances for that same span.
Getting into March Madness is the trick. Winning big games like this week could help get them there.
AP Sports Writer Maura Carey in Atlanta contributed to this report.
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