RALEIGH, N.C. — The past few years, it has become a familiar routine to point at the ACC’s last team standing, three times a No. 5 seed or worse that reached the Final Four, as testimony to the strength of the league.

Surely, a league capable of sending a team from that far down the standings all the way to the third weekend of the NCAA Tournament has value that goes beyond the quadrants and metrics of the NCAA.

“ACC teams improve during the season,” is one argument. “Our tough schedule prepares teams for the postseason,” is a corollary to that. In some years, there’s even some truth to it.

Even in the best years, it’s scant consolation for the days when the ACC claimed three of the No. 1 seeds — in 2019, including eventual national champion Virginia — and this season there’s none. Duke has done what’s expected of it, cruising past Mount St. Mary’s and Baylor to a Sweet 16 date with Caleb Love (again) and Arizona. But the rest of the league has so badly failed to live up to its end of the bargain. Historically failed.

Only the ACC among all conferences had gotten two or more teams out of the first round every year since the tournament expanded not just to 64 teams in 1985, but 32 teams in 1975, the first year anyone could have more than one team in the field.

Every year. Every single year. Until now.

Until recently, you could count on Roy Williams and his 15-1 record in the first round at North Carolina to help with that, but UNC followed up its resounding yes-we-belong win over San Diego State in the First Four with a maybe-we-don’t first half against Ole Miss that doomed the Tar Heels to a seven-point loss. Louisville and Clemson combined to go 36-4 in ACC play but combined to lose their first-round games, as favorites.

That leaves Duke, and only Duke, carrying the ACC flag. The Blue Devils are in good position to give the ACC its fifth team in the Final Four over the past four seasons, a number that tracks with the conference’s strong historical performance. But that’s all there is.

And Duke is a no-brainer, the clear class of the league since Day 1, a team capable of beating both North Carolina and Louisville without its best player to win the conference title. The ACC’s case lately has been made by teams overlooked in the seeding process.

Eighth-seeded UNC in 2022. Fifth-seeded Miami in 2023. Eleventh-seeded N.C. State in 2024. You could make an argument, at least, that those teams were battle-tested, avatars of the ACC’s strength and depth. Then again, the coaches of the last two are already gone from their schools. So maybe not.

There are a million theories as to the why and how the ACC got this way, from the internal — bad coaching hires and a two-decade emphasis on football that got the ACC nowhere in that sport while crippling its bread and butter — to the external: the financial rise and dominance of the Big Ten and SEC to start, as well as adding weak programs like SMU and Cal and Stanford to the ACC, especially compared to additions elsewhere like Oregon and UCLA and Texas and Oklahoma and Arizona and Houston.

The ACC has demonstrably gotten worse at basketball, through action or inaction, and a few fortuitous March runs papered over that deficit nicely until all the bills came due this season. The ACC’s NCAA Tournament performance to end the season looks exactly like its poor nonconference performance to begin it.

A brick is a brick is a brick.

In 2015 and 2016, ACC teams went 36-12 in the tournament and accounted for five and six spots in the Sweet 16, the latter an NCAA record.

This year, the SEC has seven teams, breaking the ACC’s record. The Big Ten has four. The Big 12 has four. The ACC has Duke. That’s exactly how you would expect the first week of the tournament to play out based on the way the rest of the season went.

Is there hope for the future? New hires like Will Wade at N.C. State and Ryan Odom at Virginia, both of whom have taken multiple programs to the postseason, are the kind of coaches the ACC should be hiring. Miami’s hire of Jai Lucas, the precocious Duke assistant, is higher risk, but absolutely the kind of swing a program like Miami should be taking. All three get high grades.

Florida State stayed within the program to hire former player Luke Loucks, but hiring NBA assistants without college experience hasn’t exactly been a reliable path to success anywhere. In fact, it resembles the kind of tepid hire that’s gotten the ACC in the fix it’s in now. That’s going to be a wait-and-see situation.

More importantly, in this new era of revenue-sharing and unfettered NIL, are ACC programs committed to spending what it takes to compete in this new world of college basketball? A few obviously are. Others evince less confidence. The risk here is that the ACC falls further behind not only the SEC and Big Ten, but also Big East and Atlantic 10 schools that don’t have to worry about football and can throw resources at basketball. In other words: Things can always get worse.

Duke may yet carry the ACC’s flag into the Final Four, maybe even win the national title, and it won’t be a surprise — but it will be a shallow victory for a league that had one legitimately good team.

Let it be a low point. Basketball’s too important to the ACC — or was too important, anyway — to go on like this.

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