ACC doing its part on field in war it can’t win
RALEIGH, N.C. — They'll always find a way to move the goalposts, the blathering Saturday morning yakkers and the national radio idiots and writers who live off the scraps in the gutter outside the giant college football narrative factory. No matter what the ACC does, no matter how many games it wins, it'll always play second banana to the Big Ten and SEC.
And look, OK, sometimes that is God's honest truth. This hasn't been the best of decades for ACC football, with just one consistent title contender and a whole mess of underachievers, starting with Florida State and Miami and Virginia Tech — all programs that were once in the BCS/CFP conversation and now are … not.
But in this very tumultuous season so far, after another summer of realignment continued to tear at the fabric of the sport, the ACC's got as much to shout about as anyone. It's 8-7 against the rest of the Power Five with more wins against the Big Ten and SEC than any other conference, and with half the league still undefeated, still harboring various degrees of December ambition.
Turn on the television or radio, whatever your network of choice, what's the national narrative? Not that Duke is beating up on people. Not that North Carolina is winning games it would have lost a year ago. No, it's that Clemson is vulnerable. Or Florida State almost lost (but didn't) at Boston College. Or that Stanford — still only unofficially embarrassing the ACC — lost to Sac State.
“I'm really proud of our league,” North Carolina coach Mack Brown said. “We've got a lot of good teams and with all the realignment talk, it distracts from who the teams are. These teams are playing well, they're well coached. Syracuse going to Purdue and winning is huge. I mean, that's huge. You start looking, Duke's been unbelievable.”
Brown mentioned the realignment talk perhaps pointedly, with a trio of UNC-CH trustees standing in the back of the room, members of a group that famously released an unprecedented statement opposing this latest expansion on the eve of the fateful vote. He's also not wrong to bring it up, albeit for different reasons.
Three summers of expansion, and the fact that the ACC settled for leftovers after the SEC and Big Ten ate first, the runt of the litter, only underlines the forces driving the narrative. The networks pushed the teams they wanted into those two conferences, while the ACC was left to lurch blindly on its own for what was left. It's no coincidence. What the SEC Network wanted, it got. What the ACC Network didn't want or need, it got anyway,
ESPN is all in on the SEC. Fox is all in on the Big Ten. (That explains the, uh, additional investment in those leagues from the networks lately.) That's where the narrative begins, where it takes shape before
filtering out, and it is always going to veer that way. It doesn’t matter what the ACC does. It’s never going to measure up. The game is rigged against it.
Short of getting two teams in the CFP playing each other for a national title, the ACC is never going to measure up to the favored children. There’s a financial incentive — for everyone in the College Football Industrial Complex, not just the networks — to prop up the SEC and Big Ten at the ACC’s expense. College football is the one place trickle-down economics actually works.
All the ACC can do is continue to win games and hope the perception changes at some point, although the struggles of the two Virginia schools — a combined 1-5 with losses to James Madison and Old Dominion, yet again not even the two best football teams in the Commonwealth — and the future standings-propper-uppers on the West Coast make for easy targets.
The Triangle is certainly doing its part. Duke, N.C. State and North Carolina should be a combined 11-1 after the weekend, with eminently winnable games on tap for all three, although the Tar Heels do have to go to Pittsburgh, a place that hasn’t exactly
been hospitable to them in recent years.
After winning three games North Carolina could just as easily have lost, and probably would have lost at least one of them in recent years, there’s no reason the Tar Heels can’t go up there and get the job done. N.C. State, as wobbly as its start has been, should face little resistance from reeling Virginia and Connecticut is a tricky road game
for Duke, but one the Wolfpack has already surmounted.
Throw in 3-0 Wake Forest, which survived Old Dominion and hosts Georgia Tech on Saturday, and the Big Four should be 15-1 by Monday morning, with the only loss to a solid Notre Dame team. After all the years these teams have shot themselves in the foot in September, and the ACC along with it, it’s nice to see them take care of business for a
change.
(It would also be nice to see someone, anyone, beat Notre Dame in a regular-season game for the first time in six years. Baby steps.)
The same is true of the league at large. The ACC has held its own on the football field. If it wants credit for that, to be acknowledged for what it has done and not for what it hasn’t, it can’t stop there.