Morning Distribution for Thursday, March 16, 2023

A [FiveThirtyEight]( email [Morning Distribution]( Thursday, March 16, 2023 Your daily briefing from FiveThirtyEight --------------------------------------------------------------- The Morning Story [MM-ACC-2023-4×3]( [ACC Men’s Basketball Hit A New Low This Year. Can The NCAA Tournament Save It?]( By [Jared Dubin]( This article is part of our [March Madness]( series. For the [second]( [consecutive]( men’s college basketball season, just five of the 15 teams in the Atlantic Coast Conference were selected to participate in the NCAA Tournament: Duke earned an automatic bid and the No. 5 seed in the East after [winning the ACC tournament]( regular-season [co-champions]( Miami (No. 5 in the Midwest, No. 1 in this writer’s heart) and Virginia (No. 4 in the South) earned at-large bids; North Carolina State (No. 11 in the South) was another at-large selection; and Pittsburgh (the Panthers [defeated Mississippi State on Tuesday]( to earn the No. 11 seed in the Midwest) was assigned to one of four play-in games. It wasn’t all that long ago when the ACC was the nation’s premier men’s basketball conference. Over the past several seasons, though, the conference has taken a significant step in reverse. The latest sign of its decline: back-to-back seasons with only a third of the league’s teams making the tourney. By contrast, in the 19 NCAA Tournaments played from 2002 through 2021, the ACC only saw as little as a third of its member teams earn tournament berths four times in total — and never twice in a row. [Read more]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Weekly Listen [Play]( [Politics Podcast: This Is The Best Pollster In America]( [FiveThirtyEight] [View in browser]( [ABC News]( [Unsubscribe]( Our mailing address: FiveThirtyEight, 47 West 66th Street, New York, NY 10023.