If a touchdown dash of 50 yards begins with a single step, then maybe North Carolina got the ACC off its heels with that impressive win on Thursday at Rutgers.

Now comes the hard part. The follow-through.

Three more nonconference games today -- Navy at Duke, California at Maryland and Virginia at Connecticut -- will determine if the ACC has a chance to recover its footing.

Other than the Tar Heels' showing Thursday and a Wake Forest win over Mississippi last weekend, the early season has been a disaster. Aside from creating potential recruiting problems, the flat start was the last thing the ACC needed after winning only two of eight games in the 2007 bowl season.

There will be some isolated, and important, nonconference chances ahead. But the end of September generally coincides with the beginning of heavy conference scheduling in most of the Bowl Championship Series leagues.

After Sept. 27, ACC teams will play only a dozen nonconference games. Four of those -- South Carolina at Clemson, Florida at Florida State, Georgia Tech at Georgia and Vanderbilt at Wake -- fall during the final weekend of the season. By then, the league's national image probably will have been set.

An old coaching adage holds that you play for championship cups in October and November, but you play for clout in September and December.

The ACC is in danger of playing the bulk of its league schedule in a relative vacuum unless at least three of four teams can do what Carolina did at Rutgers.

A big part of the problem is that Florida State, coming off a 7-6 (4-4 conference) record and facing widespread roster suspensions, chose to go little early by opening against Western Carolina last weekend and Chattanooga today.

In one respect, Bobby Bowden's thinking was understandable. He's getting an earful from fans, his program is in the midst of what amounts to a full-blown retooling, and the Seminoles, over the years, have ducked almost no one outside the ACC.

Bowden simply bought some breathing room. But from the ACC's perspective, he picked an awful season to buy it. There's a decent chance that next week, the Seminoles will be back in the top-25 polls. But if they fail to prove their merit in the next three games -- Wake Forest, Colorado and at Miami -- there's going to be yet another national backlash against his program. The ACC needs that like it needs helmets without face-guards.

But for now, there is a plus side, and that's Carolina. The expectations for the Tar Heels entering the season were for a winning record, a challenging role in the league and a return to bowl participation. Come November, Rutgers clearly will be struggling for bowl eligibility, and Carolina still doesn't have the look of a strong rushing team. So what? The Tar Heels were an underdog at Rutgers and still won with ease.

The ACC needs more of the same. Coming off a loss at Middle Tennessee, Maryland needs an upset against a Pacific-10 team today, and a decent showing by Virginia at UConn is equally important.

The state of the league is such that a Duke game has become important.

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