© Aaron Doster-Imagn Images
The ACC is making the move to an 18-game conference schedule starting in the 2025-26 college basketball season. Louisville fans are not happy with a league decision on permanent opponents.
The new setup will see each program locked into a home-and-home with a preset ACC foe. In most cases, those teams have some sort of rivalry tie.
Cal will play Stanford. Duke will play North Carolina. Virginia will play Virginia Tech. NC State will play Wake Forest. Florida State will play Miami. The list goes on.
It ends with the Louisville Cardinals and SMU Mustangs.
“The 18-game schedule features teams starting league play in late December and ending on the first Saturday of March. Each team will play one primary partner both home and away as well as one variable partner home and away. The variable partner will be determined each season. Teams will play one game, home or away, against 14 of the 15 remaining teams.”
-ACC
Of the listed primary partners, only one shares the same distance between campuses as SMU and Louisville. That pairing is Notre Dame and Boston College, schools with past history across a variety of sports in a “Holy War” that predates their ACC affiliation.
Most of the other conference rivalries involve teams within the same state or just across borders. The Cardinals are located 846 miles away from the Mustangs. They have no history with just three meetings in the three-plus decades. Louisville basketball fans aren’t exactly thrilled with the announcement.
“Louisville’s primary partner is SMU… BOOOO!” one social media user wrote. “That’s garbage,” said another.
Some went as far as to demand the Cardinals leave the ACC altogether. “Please leave the ACC whenever the TV Rights deal ends. The league is absolute trash.”
Louisville’s biggest sports rival is Kentucky. The Wildcats are members of the SEC. With no real conference rival to choose from, the ACC paired the Cardinals with the last team available.
The decision made the program feel like an afterthought in the scheduling decision. Unfortunately, there’s not much they’ll be able to do about it.
There could be a bright side, however. Louisville basketball is a perfect 3-0 against the Mustangs dating back to 2014. If they can continue that dominance, it might help ease the frustrations currently being felt by the fanbase.