The Atlantic Coast Conference entered the season hoping to create a jolt for men’s basketball, a flagship sport facing a dwindling count of March Madness bids in recent years.“We just weren’t performing at the level that anybody was satisfied with,” ACC commissioner Jim Phillips told The Associated Press.It looks like those efforts worked entering this week’s ACC Tournament in Charlotte, North Carolina.Duke arrives as the No. 1-ranked team in the AP Top 25 after a second straight one-loss run through the league. But the ACC overall has positioned itself to reclaim bids that had gone missing in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic.“There’s no question the league is elevated,” Duke coach Jon Scheyer said after Saturday’s win against rival North Carolina in the regular-season finale. “The metrics would tell you that, the number of teams we’re going to get in the (NCAAs) would tell you that. And I think we’ve really been tested in different ways.”The ACC had a league-record nine NCAA bids in 2017 and 2018, but slid to five from 2022-24, then four as an 18-team league last year — the fewest since getting four in 2013 with just 12 schools. That coincided with a multi-year sideline overhaul headlined by retirements of Hall of Famers like UNC’s Roy Williams (2021), Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski (2022) and Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim (2023).The league is projected to have eight bids according to Monday’s latest projections from ESPN, BracketMatrix.com — which averaged 79 mock brackets —and Bart Torvik’s analytics site.It comes after multiple moves such as cutting a 20-game league slate to 18 this year so teams had more flexibility to schedule quality nonconference matchups. Phillips has pointed to multipl …
