For one season, ACC can claim supremacy over SEC
Clemson knocked Alabama off the top of the college football mountain early Tuesday morning, but the ACC dethroned the SEC — for the 2016 college football season, at least — long before Hunter Renfrow’s 2-yard touchdown clinched the national title for the Tigers.
Supremacy is not about feel or, as the SEC’s unbelievably smug slogan, “It just means more,” suggests, passion. It is established by numbers.
And here’s the ACC’s indisputable numerical argument: 10-4.
The ACC won 10 of the 14 games played between the two Power Five conferences this season, including a 4-1 mark in the postseason. To put that in perspective, the SEC went a combined 31-9 against all other FBS conferences.
So Clemson’s 35-31 win over No. 1 Alabama in the College Football Playoff title game was merely the icing on the cake. And the ACC, after a sterling 9-3 overall mark in the postseason, gets to take the cake, the icing, the serving plates and the forks for the 2016 season.
The Big Ten could have made an argument before the postseason, but its top three teams, which finished in the top 6 of the CFP rankings, all lost — two in head-tohead matchups with the ACC (Ohio State and Michigan).
To be clear, this one season doesn’t change what the SEC has done. The SEC, indisputably, has been the country’s top football conference and has pushed the sport to new heights financially and in popularity. It just means the SEC doesn’t get to shout “S-E-C!” all summer.
Here ’s where t h e ACC has caught the SEC: league depth. Florida State (10-3), Virginia Tech (10-4), Miami (9-4) and Louisville (9-4) finished the season in the top 25.
Pittsburgh (8-5) beat Clemson (14-1) on the road, and N.C. State (7-6) nearly beat the Tigers on the same field save for a missed 33-yard field goal.
“I think all of you media folks need to change your stories,” said Clemson coach Dabo Swinney, who is 8-4 vs. the SEC since the start of the 2012 season. “This league has never gotten the respect it deserves.”
Alabama’s average margin of victory in nine SEC games was 24.8 points. The Tide (14-1) only played one conference game decided by single digits (its first, a 48-43 win at Ole Miss on Sept. 17).
While the ACC has gotten deeper, with five teams in the final AP top 25 — compared with just three in 2013 — the SEC has seen what was its strength become a weakness.
Four SEC teams won the national title in a four-year s pa n b e t ween 2 007 a nd ’ 1 0. T h e l e a g u e c l a i med seven straight national titles between ’06 and ’12.
But since the 2013 season, when Florida State won the last Bowl Championship Series title (beating Auburn in the process), the SEC has slowly devolved into the ACC from the 1990s when it was FSU and everyone else.
(The ACC is 19-13 vs. the SEC since that season.)
Al a b a ma was t he o nly SEC team to finish the season with double-digit wins, compared with three from the ACC. The Tide were the only SEC team with fewer than four losses and the only one in the top 10. The ACC had more teams in the top 10 and more in the top 20.
So it’s the Clemson flag on the top of the mountain, as Swinney said after the game, and there’s the ACC’s flying right next to it.
At least for this year.