The best way to evaluate the ACC football season? This is still a basketball league.
Well, that didn’t turn out so well.
There’s still plenty of time to indulge in happy talk about ACC bowl participation, and for in-depth analysis of undefeated Clemson’s chance to win another national title. But before we rush forward, the recently concluded regular season confirmed an uncomfortable truth we continue to avoid: teams and programs may stand out from time to time, but the enduring quality of conference football explains why the ACC remains known as a basketball league.
Rather than bristle at this characterization, putting up a stouter defense than many league teams manage on the field, ACC boosters and administrators might consider accepting it in the spirit of realistic self-appraisal. ACC football is exciting and entertaining. What it’s not, especially this year, is excellent, meriting secondary football status that’s less a slur than recognition of a comfortable fit.
Honest evaluation doesn’t mean abandoning aspirations to greater competitive heights. Rather it suggests seeking clarity, resisting the twin gravitational pulls of envy and false bravado; the ceaseless drumbeat of expectation and premature congratulation within the regional echo chamber; and the sugar-rush of new beginnings emanating from eight football head coaching changes in three years, remarkable and largely unremarked turnover.
The 2018 regular season didn’t offer much argument for ACC exceptionalism. Once again only Clemson is apt to finish in the top 10 in the final polls, marking the 14th time in this century’s 18 seasons either one or no ACC team will rank that high. Refer to the SEC and Big 10 to view a higher standard.
Clemson just now is in a figurative league of its own. Since 2011 Dabo Swinney has led an ongoing Tiger run of eight straight seasons with 10 or more victories, capped by the 2016 FBS title. Only FSU’s Bobby Bowden among ACC coaches won more national championships (1993, 1999) or compiled more seasons with consecutive double-figure wins – nine from 1992 through 2000.
Wolfpack rising
Beyond its South Carolina outpost the ACC otherwise was nondescript this season, if that. Only three teams, all in the Atlantic Division, won as many as nine regular-season games overall – Clemson, Syracuse and N.C. State. Pitt reached the ACC championship game with a middling 7-5 overall record matched by four other squads in the Coastal.
Meanwhile, the Wolfpack continued their upward trajectory under Dave Doeren, ranking with Clemson as the only teams in the ACC’s top five in both total offense and total defense. No one outshone the Pack, led by All-ACC quarterback Ryan Finley, in passing offense (327.7 yards per game) and passing efficiency, bringing them to the threshold of a 10-victory season, rare for the school, when they meet Texas A&M in the Gator Bowl on New Year’s Eve.
ACC teams were 4-9 in regular-season meetings with power conference opponents, 4-14 if you throw in five losses to undefeated, independent Notre Dame, the league’s quasi-partner in football.
Florida State and Virginia Tech, two of the ACC’s perennial high achievers, the modern imports most likely with Clemson to amass records and ratings among the nation’s best, plummeted to unaccustomed depths in 2018.
In its inaugural year under Willie Taggert’s guidance, FSU won’t go to a bowl for the first time in 37 seasons, ending the nation’s longest streak of postseason participation. (The run is tainted, since cheating led to vacating a 2006 Emerald Bowl win over UCLA.)
With Florida State sidetracked, the longest streak in this era of 40 bowls devolves to Virginia Tech with 26 consecutive appearances. This year’s berth was earned, so to speak, with a wholly unimpressive 6-6 record facilitated by an early home win over FCS member William and Mary.
Others falling
Bud Foster’s ordinarily strong Hokies defense allowed four opponents, including Old Dominion, to score at least 45 points each. Similarly Louisville, yet another previously potent program, crashed and burned in its fourth ACC season, beating a single FBS team. (North Carolina likewise had a single FBS win.) The Cardinals, with two Bobby Petrino sons-in-law on the defensive staff, gave up at least 45 points in seven of 12 games, including a basketball-like 77 at Clemson.
Louisville was 0-8 within the league, only the seventh team to go winless since divisions were formed in 2005. That resulted in Petrino joining UNC’s Larry Fedora among five jettisoned ACC coaches over the past three seasons. Two more retired, and Jimbo Fisher jumped from Florida State to the SEC.
Costly coaching changes
That leaves only four ACC coaches with as much as a half-dozen years in place, led by Swinney and Duke’s David Cutcliffe, reportedly offered the UNC job well before coming to Durham. Cutcliffe and Swinney share ACC seniority with 11 years each at their current posts.
While we’re on the subject of coaching changes, we can’t avoid the sad spectacle of money-sotted UNC -- $131.8 million contributed by Rams Club members over the past two years -- shelling out $12.2 million to make Fedora go away, then paying his feel-good successor, Mack Brown, a higher salary to forsake a TV commentator’s role to return to the sidelines.
Add the Fedora buyout to the millions burned on legal and public relations fees to parry punishment for athletes’ exploitation of hollow Afam classes, and the new $32 million indoor football practice the publication Inside Carolina described as looking like “a giant spaceship has landed in the middle of campus”. Throw in the NCAA probation the football program incurred earlier this decade, and UNC gives a convincing imitation of a school that’s mortgaged its soul for football success.
Surely it’s time for UNC and its ACC compatriots to embrace moderation, a saner perspective in which some facilities and practices are simply too expensive, some principles simply too inviolate, some ambitions simply too corrupting.
We can dream, anyway.
This story was originally published December 18, 2018 at 12:47 PM.