Could Louisville basketball compete for top 4 spot in ACC?

The media picked Louisville basketball to finish 11th in the ACC standings in the preseason poll, but after a big win against UNC have the Cards shown enough to believe they could finish in the top 4 of the conference?

In the words of LJ tha Fiasco of The Crunch Zone, the ACC has looked “drunk” through two weeks of conference play. After going 0-18 last season in ACC play, Pittsburgh picked up their first ACC win in two years when they beat Louisville basketball last week, which at the time looked like a bad loss for Louisville. Since then Pittsburgh has taken #17 North Carolina State down to the wire and knocked off the #9 ranked Florida State Seminoles. Within a week, Louisville fell to Pittsburgh on a Wednesday night, and followed that up by handing UNC their biggest home loss in the Roy Williams era.

It doesn’t stop there.

After a freak injury to Tre Jones, the #1 ranked Duke Blue Devils fell to 11-5 Syracuse, who had been beaten by the likes of UConn, Oregon, Georgia Tech and Old Dominion. There’s plenty more examples that would support the argument I’m about to make, which is the ACC is wide open after looking like it was Duke’s for the taking.

That’s not it, the weirdness keeps going.

Virginia Tech, a team expected to be a top 4 contender in the ACC, was blown out by Virginia last evening while the conference’s worst team, Wake Forest, knocked off North Carolina State.

Once again, the ACC is wide open. So where does Louisville fit in?

This season was expected to be a “bridge” season for Louisville basketball with Chris Mack being in his first season as head coach, coaching a team with just 10 scholarship players that brought back the majority of a roster that failed to make the NCAA tournament last season.

But now that same Louisville basketball team is one of just two NCAA teams to have two wins against opponents ranked in the top 10 of the new NET rankings. While the team does have 5 losses, none of them, aside from Pittsburgh, are to teams outside of the KenPom top 50 rankings nor come from the ACC.

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We are just two weeks into ACC and there is still plenty of games left and a lot of time to shake things out in the nation’s most competitive conference, but there’s plenty of reasons to believe that the Cards can compete with the likes of Duke, Virginia, Virginia Tech, Florida State, NC State for one of the coveted top four spots and a double bye in the ACC tournament.

Am I crazy for thinking that? Yes, maybe.

Just six days ago we were talking about the Cards being on the wrong side of the bubble for the NCAA tournament which is still two months away. But if you watched the game on Saturday afternoon against #12 ranked North Carolina, you too would believe that the Cards have a chance to beat anybody on any given night, including Duke and Virginia.

What will it take to land in the top 4 of the ACC?

Well to start, it’s going to take somebody stepping up and becoming the robin to Jordan Nwora’s Batman role. Dwayne Sutton has looked like that guy through Louisville’s first 16 games, as he currently is the teams third leading scorer at 10 points per game. Christen Cunningham, who our own Presley Meyer said is Louisville’s most valuable player through the first half of the season, has scored 20+ points in three of the last four games and has established himself as the team’s leader.

Another factor for Louisville will be the continued development of Steven Enoch, who looked like one of the most dominant big men in the ACC for the first time during the game against North Carolina. His play coming off the bench will be crucial for Louisville is they are going to take the next step to compete against the likes of Duke and Virginia.

The ACC looked to be a four team race between Duke, North Carolina, Virginia Tech, and Virginia, but so far what we’ve seen is that the conference is much deeper and much more talented than originally expected.

There’s still plenty of time for things to shake out but Louisville competing for a double bye isn’t as far out of a possibility as once expected. But even with a brutal stretch of games in February that features five games against teams in the top 15

“The ACC is very unpredictable right now,” said Louisville center Steven Enoch. “A lot of teams are getting upset, and I feel like the most tough, together and unbreakable team will prevail again.”

An ACC competition that at one point seemed like a three-horse race between Duke, Virginia and North Carolina could still turn out that way, but the rest of the pack is not as far behind as anticipated.

Next. Louisville basketball game grades: Cards lead UNC wire to wire in victory. dark

That includes our Cards. If Louisville is able to take care of business tonight against Boston College and this weekend against Georgia Tech on the road they’ll take the next step into competing at the top. February looms large over the program but building a strong base through January will help Louisville be around to compete for a top 4 seed in the ACC.

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