A team with 12 losses just earned an ACC tournament bye.

Thanks to Georgia Tech’s decision to drop its appeal over NCAA violations, the Yellow Jackets will sit out of next week’s ACC tournament in Greensboro. With the field whittled down to 14, the top-heavy ACC will have a battle between teams with at least 12 losses to get the resulting bye.

The reward for finishing 10th will be not having to play on Tuesday in the first round of the tournament. The tenth seed now gets to open up against the seventh seed on Wednesday, which is a pretty significant bonus.

No ACC school, since expansion to 15 teams in basketball, has ever reached the championship game in a fifth straight day of competing.

N.C. State, Duke, Carolina and Georgia Tech are the only teams to ever make the finals in their fourth game; State lost (to UNC) in 1997 and 2007; Georgia Tech lost in 2010; Duke won in 2017, and Carolina lost in 2015 and ’18.

Only one school has ever captured its conference tournament playing five games, UConn in 2011, when the Huskies led by former Hornets and current Celtics star Kemba Walker did so in the Big East; amazingly, they went on to win six games in the NCAA tournament, defeating Butler on Monday night to complete the most improbable national championship run ever.

Carolina can now sneak into 10th place and avoid playing Tuesday if the 12-17 Tar Heels win out and the four teams above them in the ACC standings – Pitt, Wake Forest, Miami and Virginia Tech – all lose out this week. In such an unlikely case, UNC would play the No. 7 seed on Wednesday at 7. And that has only become possible since Georgia Tech will sit out the tournament.

The Jackets are only the third team in ACC annals after UNC in 1961 and Maryland in 1991 to miss the showcase event of the conference due to probations.

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