Jim Phillips, in his fourth year as the commissioner of the ACC, found himself in Dallas on Sunday knowing that the conference was going to have a Final Four team no matter what. That regardless of the outcome between N.C. State and Duke in the NCAA Tournament South Regional final, the ACC would be back on college basketball’s most illustrious national stage.

Again. Same as always, it seems.

Yet he knew, too, that one conference team had to lose. It made for a strange and challenging dynamic, said Phillips, who during an interview with The News & Observer on Thursday described watching State’s victory against Duke as a day of “great joy, and a celebratory moment” but one mixed with “great heartache,” for the Blue Devils.

“And we’ve done a lot of that in our conference,” he said, referencing the Duke-North Carolina game in the 2022 national semifinals, which UNC won, and Clemson’s victory against Notre Dame in the men’s soccer national championship game last fall.

“It demonstrates just the level of play and the level of success that we’re having in a multitude of sports,” Phillips said. “But certainly it’s a unique time. You get there and you’re wishing that they weren’t playing each other, honestly — that they both would have a chance to get to the Final Four.

“But that’s how it goes.”

If only the divided allegiance was the most difficult part of his job these days. Phillips, and the ACC, have been under siege in recent months — attacks coming from several angles. Florida State and Clemson, for one, are both suing the conference over its grant of rights agreement. The ACC, for a while now, has fought an ongoing and growing perception problem related to football.

Not even ACC basketball, once considered the national standard of the sport, has been immune. Since after the 2018-19 season, when Duke, UNC and Virginia all earned No. 1 seeds in the NCAA Tournament, the conference has endured annual attacks about its strength and relevance. This season, national pundits routinely dismissed the ACC as inferior; some suggested it wasn’t as good or as deep of a basketball conference as the Mountain West, let alone the Big 12, which became something of a media darling.

It was the continuation of a narrative that has persisted in recent years: That ACC basketball has declined. That it isn’t nearly as strong as it used to be. That other leagues, namely the Big 12 and SEC, have surpassed it. This is the third consecutive season the ACC has received just five NCAA Tournament bids. Compare that to the seven bids it received in 2021 and 2019, and the nine it received in 2018 and 2017.

Despite the relative lack of tournament representation, though, the league’s performance has remained strong — so much so, Phillips said, that “the narrative” surrounding the conference “is not matching the output.” N.C. State is the fourth ACC team to reach the Final Four over the past three seasons. In this NCAA Tournament, the conference had three teams in the Elite Eight, while another, UNC, suffered a two-point loss in the Sweet 16.

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