Happy Thanksgiving weekend, ACC country. Before our writers Manny Navarro and Andy Bitter get to your mailbag questions, we start where we always do.
The Athletic’s ACC Power Rankings
1. Clemson: If the Tigers win the ACC, USC loses and Georgia beats LSU in the SEC title game, Clemson has a pretty good shot at making the College Football Playoff field, particularly if Ohio State beats Michigan.
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2. Florida State: The Noles are in a weird spot, rooting for Clemson to get into the Playoff so they can get the league’s Orange Bowl bid.
3. North Carolina: That Georgia Tech loss is why UNC can’t have nice things. And it wasn’t even all on the defense. The offense stopped playing.
4. Louisville: Who’d have thunk the Cardinals would get back here after the way the season started? Beating Kentucky would mean six wins in seven games.
5. Pitt: Same for the Fighting Nard Dogs, who were 4-4 at one point but have rattled off three straight wins and could finish second in the Coastal.
6. Duke: Win or lose this last one against Wake Forest, the Blue Devils have shown us something this year, competitive in every game.
7. Wake Forest: Getting to eight wins would still be pretty special. Wake’s only done that nine times in its history.
8. NC State: When you’re down to your fourth-string quarterback, you’re probably just hoping the season mercifully comes to an end.
9. Syracuse: That’s now five consecutive losses, the last four by double digits. We’d still say Dino Babers is safe, but man, that’s quite the whiplash.
10. Miami: The Canes’ season has been pretty cut-and-dried: Beat the bad teams and lose to the good ones. Also, lose to Texas A&M and Middle Tennessee.
11. Georgia Tech: OK, Brent Key is officially starting to give the GT brass some things to think about.
12. Virginia: Considering the circumstances, totally the right call to end the season. Who can concentrate on football at a time like this?
13. Virginia Tech: All things considered, going out with a road win at Liberty is a pretty good sendoff for a 3-8 team.
14. Boston College: Oh, Eagles. What happened? Forty-four-goose egg against Notre Dame was not the momentum builder you were looking for.
Mailbag
Just how deflating was North Carolina’s loss to Georgia Tech with regard to the national perspective of the conference? – Greg L.
Bitter: I think you might be giving the conference too much respect for its national reputation to begin with.
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To start, though, the UNC loss wasn’t great. The ACC had the potential of two top-10 teams squaring off on championship game weekend. For a league that’s only had that three times in its history — and one was the COVID-19 season when Notre Dame made it — it’s a missed opportunity.
Shoot, if things played out a certain way, those teams could have been playing for a chance at the Playoff. It wasn’t likely, but it wasn’t impossible either. And Drake Maye had a legitimate shot at the Heisman if he put up a big performance in the spotlight like that against a name-brand defense.
Now? It’ll feel like a lot of ACC championship games in the recent past. Can someone unseat Clemson? Can the Tigers make it into the College Football Playoff field? Will everyone turn this game off by halftime?
Don’t get me wrong. There’s still a chance this could be a great game. Clemson’s a known program and North Carolina is a fun one with the offense it has. This can still be a highly entertaining matchup.
But as for the national perspective of the conference, I think that already took a hit when one of the shakier recent Notre Dame teams pretty soundly beat the two teams that will be playing for the league championship. The ACC was done in by its own fifth-eighths partner! That’s a tough blow.
No sooner did the big four on Tobacco Road all get bowl-eligible in the same year for the first time ever, they all started tripping over their shoelaces in the later part of the season. Is it as simple as attrition through injuries without enough depth to make up for it? Or are opponents figuring them out with a half-season of game tape on them now? What’s with the collective face-plant? – BD G.
Navarro: All of your suggestions, BD, fit the bill. But I’d also suggest nobody in the ACC is really that much better than anybody else except Clemson when quarterback DJ Uiagalelei is playing well. Florida State has emerged as a legit No. 2 over the last couple of weeks. But the Seminoles weren’t good enough to beat Wake Forest, NC State or Clemson in October. The teams play 12-game schedules … not six.
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Let’s be honest. This is still pretty much a one-team league from a national perspective. A quick case study in four Coastal head-to-head matchups shows you that: Georgia Tech “upset” UNC 21-17 last week. Well, two weeks ago, Miami beat Georgia Tech by 21. Before that, North Carolina beat Miami by three points; Duke beat Miami by 24. Georgia Tech, meanwhile, beat Duke by three. Based on Georgia Tech’s overall record, you’re not putting the Yellow Jackets (5-6) in the same ballpark as UNC (9-2) or Duke (7-4). Nobody will either after No. 1 Georgia gets through with the Yellow Jackets this coming weekend.
But, again, let’s just be honest about the whole thing. Only Clemson has a team that should beat every other ACC team when it lines up week-to-week. There’s not any real separation on the field from a talent and skill perspective for the rest of the league. Is 3-8 BC better than Louisville? The Eagles beat the Cardinals (7-4). Some teams have good days and bad days. But real, sizable separation? None. Drake Maye got hot for UNC. That’s why they’re 9-2. Sam Hartman cooled off. That’s why Wake slipped. NC State lost Devin Leary. And Duke is maximizing everything it has. Simple as that.
Can FSU still get into a New Year’s Six game? – Christopher C.
Navarro: Yes, as long as they beat Florida this week and Clemson gets into the College Football Playoff. North Carolina’s loss to Georgia Tech and Tennessee’s loss to South Carolina last week opened the door to those possibilities.
How big is bowl season for the ACC? – Randolph R.
Bitter: Are bowl seasons ever really that big? I know we in the media like to compare the records of the major conferences and make a big deal out of it, but does it say all that much about the ACC if Syracuse beats East Carolina or somebody else in the Fenway Bowl?
We judge leagues by the top. Nobody really cares about depth. If Clemson sneaks into the Playoff and gets blown out by Georgia, the storyline will be “Same ol’ ACC,” even if a lot of potential four seeds are going to get blown out by the Bulldogs.
Oddly, if the ACC doesn’t get a team in, thus avoiding a 1-versus-4 blowout that seems to happen every year, it might not be the worst thing from a reputation standpoint, even if it results in less money and exposure. A team getting a Playoff berth pushes everybody else up one rung in the conference’s bowl pecking order, possibly into a matchup that’s too big for their britches.
If Clemson plays a winnable game in the Orange Bowl and everyone else gets a more properly suited opponent, perhaps the ACC wins a few of these top-tier games and helps the league’s rep a little.
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I still think bowl success is overblown, though, especially with these games becoming even more of an exhibition with all the opt-outs taking place. The ACC went 9-3 in bowl games in 2016. It didn’t radically alter the league’s course. It was just a nice storyline for one postseason that was gone as soon as the next year kicked off.
Will Brent Key be Georgia Tech’s coach in 2023? – Rick M.
Go watch his postgame interview after the UNC game. If you are athletic director J Batt, see that interview, how could you choose someone else? – Michael F.
Navarro: Our Jeff Schultz definitely made a nice case for Key with this story earlier this week. Personally, I think Key could make a very good head coach one day. But I’ve been around enough former assistants turned first-time head coaches at Miami (Randy Shannon, Manny Diaz) in the past two decades to know sometimes the best move when you’re trying to change the culture is to go outside and bring in a new coach. Key, 44, is a nice story. But you have to think of the big picture at Georgia Tech. Key isn’t in Clemson. He’s in Atlanta.
You need a coach who can handle living in a city where you aren’t even the home team everyone roots for. I was sitting in the press box at Bobby Dodd Stadium two weeks ago and could spot Georgia Bulldogs logos all over the city (from the press box!) If Georgia Tech is ever going to compete for conference titles, it needs a big personality coach who can win over his town first, and then actually put up a fight against Georgia on the recruiting trail. Key could use a little seasoning at a Group of 5 program in my mind. Learn what works and what doesn’t, and then come back and coach his alma mater. But that’s just one dumb sportswriter’s opinion.
When do you see Miami getting back to being “The U”? Do you see this as a similar situation to 1997, albeit under different circumstances, where you go 5-7 or 6-6, and then build up so in 4-5 years you can say Miami is among the elite? – Adam F.
Navarro: This isn’t 1997 at all in Coral Gables. Back then, Miami was dealing with sanctions, had won a national title only six years earlier, played for another one the year after that and had legitimate NFL talent on the roster. The 1997 Hurricanes had Edgerrin James, Reggie Wayne, Santana Moss and Bubba Franks alone on offense.
Mario Cristobal is in a much more Howard Schnellenberger-type situation. Miami hasn’t been relevant in decades. In some sense, I think it’s a tougher job than what Schnellenberger inherited in 1979. Miami had no expectations then. Cristobal does and he has to convince great players to come to Miami in an era where the SEC is clearly the best conference, and Alabama, Ohio State, Georgia and Clemson have things rolling.
In the 1980s, Miami wasn’t in an inferior conference (the Canes were an independent) and there were no clear-cut kings in the sport. South Florida wasn’t an established recruiting hotbed either. The one thing Cristobal has that none of his predecessors did is a 10-year contract, with financial backing from the school and NIL dollars. That at least helps.
Cristobal’s rebuild will require a handful of great recruiting and transfer classes before Miami comes close to becoming a perennial contender. Having a 12-team playoff could help Miami look like it’s closer to being “The U” again than it is. But Miami becoming “The U” again for real? The Canes won four national titles from 1983-91 and played for three others (1985, 1986, 1988) over that stretch. It’s hard to see that happening again.
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Is Louisville ready to consistently fight to be the No. 2 team in the Atlantic? A Kentucky win would be their 8th and they are looking at a top-20 recruiting class. – Will F.
Bitter: It’s been quite the turnaround, hasn’t it? Scott Satterfield certainly saved his job, and the Cardinals are well-aligned for the future, with a signing class that has eight blue-chippers, just behind Miami and Florida State, who have much easier access to those types of players. (Methinks Louisville has this NIL thing figured out.)
But the Cardinals have been such a volatile football program over the years that I have a hard time completely buying in. The first Bobby Petrino run was followed by a lull under Steve Kragthorpe. Charlie Strong brought it back and Petrino had early success in his second run before bottoming out in 2018. Satterffield has been both good and bad in his brief four years.
And let’s face it, the Louisville athletic department hasn’t exactly been a model of stability over the years. It’s when you have that alignment and steadiness across all aspects of your athletic department that you generally see programs put together consistent runs of success.
But to your question, there is no more Atlantic Division after this year. They’re scrapping the divisions, making the ACC one, single, free-for-all. And Louisville might benefit as much as anyone.
The Cardinals were on the tougher half of the league, the one that had the playoff-caliber roadblock almost every year for the last decade. With Georgia Tech, Miami and Virginia as annual rivals, Louisville won’t have to play Clemson and Florida State every season. (The Noles haven’t been all that recently, but they seem to be turning the corner, and those are the league’s two big dogs when they’re right.)
With what looks like it should be a pretty good roster situation and the possibility of catching a few schedule breaks, it feels like Louisville’s got a chance here to make some noise. I’d like the Cardinals’ chances a bit more if Florida State wasn’t putting it together, but with traditionally strong programs like Virginia Tech and Miami still in the dumps, the league has room at the top for new contenders. And Louisville’s profile sets it up pretty well.
With one week to go in the regular season, how do ACC teams stack up nationally and within the conference in recruiting for ‘23? – Willis O.
Navarro: Here’s what the 247Sports Composite team standings had for the league as of 2 p.m. Wednesday as far as high school recruiting — Clemson was ninth, Miami 10th, Florida State 17th, Louisville 18th, North Carolina 23rd, Duke 36th, Wake Forest 39th, Virginia Tech 40th, Boston College 43rd, NC State 48th, Pittsburgh 49th, Georgia Tech 56th, Virginia 63rd and Syracuse 90th.
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To be honest, what happens in the transfer portal is going to be much more important as far as immediate impact in 2023. Pay attention to what happens between Dec. 5 and Jan. 18, and then again May 1-15. That’s when the transfer windows are open. Florida State made its quick turnaround this season because Mike Norvell is really good at identifying and addressing needs there. Whoever handles it best in this coming cycle could be the next “surprise team” in the league.
(Top photo of North Carolina’s Drake Maye being tackled by Georgia Tech’s Charlie Thomas: Bob Donnan / USA Today)