Pat Kelsey believes ACC is ‘as good as any in the country’ this season

It’s just Louisville Cardinals head coach Pat Kelsey‘s first season coaching in the ACC. Despite that, he already has a feel for the conference and believes it to be among the best in the country.

It was after Louisville’s close win over Pitt on Saturday when Kelsey was asked about the ACC this season. For him, the way Pitt played in the game goes to show just how good the entire conference is, even if his focus tends to be one game at a time.

“I think our league is as good as any in the country,” Pat Kelsey said. “Two of the better teams, I think, were playing tonight. It was a big-time college atmosphere and they’re a really, really good team and there’s a lot of good teams in our conference.”

Louisville started this season by going 7-4 against a difficult non-conference schedule. Since then, Kelsey has led the Cardinals to a strong start in ACC play. Louisville is now 5-1 in ACC play and hasn’t lost since December 14th to Kentucky.

“Sometimes when I get questions like that, to talk about the trees and the big picture, and all the other teams in the conference, I am so narrow-minded focused on the next team we play against,” Kelsey said. “So, I’m an expert at Duke, because we played them, Florida State, because we played them, Virginia, because we played them, Clemson, because we played them, these guys, because we played them, Carolina. I don’t know anything about anybody else because I don’t have the bandwidth in this pea-brain of mine to worry about that many other teams because we have like 40 of them in the conference now.”

The ACC, as a conference, has some of the country’s biggest basketball brands. Despite that, there has been some criticism in recent years that the ACC hasn’t lived up to expectations. That included only sending five teams to last year’s NCAA Tournament. Four conferences, including the Mountain West, earned more bids. 2021 was the last time the ACC had more than five bids in the NCAA Tournament and the 2018 NCAA Tournament was the last season in which the ACC earned the most bids of any conference.

From here, Louisville is going to continue down the line in conference play on Tuesday with a game on the road against the Syracuse Orange.