Jeff Capel, ACC Coaches Discuss League’s Status with Joe Lunardi

Back in May, Pitt head coach Jeff Capel and the rest of the ACC’s head men’s basketball coaches met with ESPN bracketologist Joe Lunardi to discuss the league’s status going forward.

“Full disclosure, I spent a couple days at the ACC meetings in May at the request of Commissioner Phillips and his deputy for basketball, Paul Brazeau,” Lunardi told PSN. “I got really unfettered, and for me, unprecedented access to all 18 coaches. Separate, multi-hour sessions in which I was able to share my data points and tricks of the trade, if you will. Last year’s omissions, whether it was Pitt or Wake, I guess, were the two most discussed. And, on the other side of the coin, Virginia as a questionable inclusion if you’re in that camp.”

Last year’s tournament field included five ACC teams: North Carolina (one seed), Clemson (six seed), Virginia (10 seed in the play-in game), Duke (four seed), and NC State (11 seed). Pitt was one of the “first four out” that narrowly missed the field.

“Overall, maybe, at least in their minds eye, the league’s eye, saw a decline in raw number of bids,” Lunardi continued. “From my way, from my seat, a disturbing drop in average seed and quality over a period of years. This, we talked about on air all last winter. For the ACC to have three number one seeds in 2019 and then not have one for five years, is unprecedented in my 30 years of doing this. This is a league that has averaged more than one one seed for two-plus decades. You might say, ‘Oh, one one seed, that’s not that big of a deal.’ It’s a huge deal. It’s a huge deal. Nobody else is even close to that. And yeah, Duke-Carolina, Duke-Carolina, Duke-Carolina, but it’s more than that. There’s been Louisville, multiple Virginias. Heck, it was Big East, but Pitt was a one seed once in my years of doing this. So, you know, when that is going South, and I credit the conference for saying hey, let’s take a look at this.”

So what did Lunardi tell the coaches?

“They allowed me to say very loudly with data, you’re complaining that this is a perception problem, when the data clearly indicates that this is a basketball problem, he said. “This isn’t a case of people in a room not recognizing that the ACC is really good. Obviously, in the tournament, they’ve been really, really good. But, what’s a better measure of overall quality — performance over three months or performance over three weeks when every game is kind of a coin flip. I would argue that I would be worried about continuing to bank on over-achieving in the tournament. That’s my take.”

Last year’s ACC teams in the big dance performed well, once again. 11-seed NC State made the Final Four. Six-seed Clemson made the Elite Eight, as did four-seed Duke. North Carolina made the Sweet 16. The year before, in 2023, Pitt, as a No. 11 seed, won two games in the tournament. The Panthers knocked off Mississippi State in the First Four and dominated No. 6 seed Iowa State in the Round of 64. Duke won just one game in that tournament, and NC State and Virginia both crashed out in the first round. Miami represented the conference by making the Final Four as a five seed.

However, despite the conference having representatives in back-to-back Final Fours, the field this season still only included five teams from the league and left out the fourth-place regular-season finisher, Pitt. The Panthers finished the season 22-11 and 12-8 in league play. The Panthers finished 40th in the NET rankings, winning four Quad One games and going 5-3 in Quad Two. Pitt did not own a Quad Four loss. Despite those numbers, Pitt’s loss to Quad Three team Missouri seemed to kill them in the eye of the committee. But, Lunardi explained, that wasn’t necessarily Pitt’s fault. More went into the Panthers missing the tournament than just a loss to Missouri.

“Now, in Pitt’s specific case, a little bit of bad luck, in terms of yeah, Missouri, you lose a game, they lose a guy, and then they go 0-18 in the SEC,” he said. “Alright, that’s pretty freakin’, you can’t plan that. If that game had been replaced by Youngstown State, right, at the beginning of the year, we would have been all over them for dropping Missouri. Then, you play WVU every year as you should, and Bob Huggins maybe has a little problem and a game that would normally be a lock high-end game becomes not for a year. And, last year, first time ever, at least that I could find, there was a quad four team in the league, Louisville. So that’s bad luck. Then, we have the bid stealers at the end of championship week. To the eye, and I’m not an eye test guy, we play 35 games for a reason, we should judge results more than opinions. But, clearly Pitt was good enough at basketball, I think.”

After that last sentence, I posed a question to Lunardi that I would assume many around Pitt basketball would reply with: Is the process for choosing the field that the committee has the correct one?

“You’re assuming that if we simply decide, in some mysterious way, who we think, or don’t think, is good enough, that that number will correspond exactly to the number of at-large bids,” Lunardi replied. “Now, I don’t think it is. Last year, I thought that there were six teams that were clearly good enough that didn’t make it, and there were five bid stealers, and typically we have one or two. Instead of one or two, they really could have won a couple of games.”

Lunardi then described his conversations with Capel and his Pitt staff, offering his advice to them for this upcoming schedule.

“If you think you might be a bubble team, don’t give them a reason,” Lunardi continued. “Coach Capel and I had this conversation publicly in front of the others. I warned him, too, I said, you’re going to get dragged. If I don’t I’m not doing my job. We might have, at dinner, had a ginger ale or two. Good guy, good conversation, and he totally got it. He totally got it. I said, yeah, it was mostly bad luck, but because we can’t count on good luck, we have to control the controll-ables, right, and a couple times during the summer there was a back-and-forth with the scheduling guy on the staff. ‘Hey, what do you think about opponent A vs. opponent B?’ Instead of going and scheduling team 325, why don’t we go and schedule 225. We’re just, not as likely, but if one is a 95 percent one and the other is an 85 percent win, don’t give them [the committee] a reason.”

Lunardi believes that this year’s ACC is going to be stronger than last year’s. In his latest bracket prediction that he released on Tuesday, he included six ACC teams.

“The league is going to be better,” Lunardi said. “Louisville only has one way to go. Cal’s going to be respectable, Madsen’s doing a good job, they have a ways to go. Stanford is probably a year away. He’s a great coach, they’ll be competitive if only because they’ll try to play 60 to 50. Andy Enfield didn’t go to SMU to suck. And, the other thing that’s going to help the ACC: they were the first to be the biggest. They lost ground, numerically, to the Big 12 by having more teams than was metrically optimal. Now, the other leagues are giving up that advantage by also being as big. All of this can be proven with numbers, so I fully expect the ACC to rebound even if they’re standing still because the other power conferences, I think, have to drift a little bit as they’ve grown.”

Watch the full interview here.