Parity shows strength of ACC football
Nov 14, 2008
The overlap of sporting events and seasons has gotten to the point the hits not only keep on coming, but rarely stop. Because we seldom get to step back and consider what we’ve just witnessed before rushing on to the next thing -- a problem not just limited to sports in America -- we are in danger of missing a remarkable development in ACC football.
Here’s how seamlessly our recent sports experiences have joined. The first games of the 2008 ACC football season, in which Wake Forest defeated Baylor and N.C. State lost to South Carolina, were played on a Thursday four days after the conclusion of the Summer Olympics. (That same late-August night, Barack Obama formally accepted the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.) Two months later, a week prior to Obama's election, the end of the baseball season arrived as Philadelphia beat Tampa Bay in earmuff weather in the rain-delayed World Series. The very next night, on October 30, the NBA commenced its regular season schedule.
Now, the college football regular season is winding down and the college basketball season is cranking up. Amidst the blur, it's easy to overlook signs that ACC football has changed, approaching a level of competitiveness, internally and nationally, unmatched since the conference expanded in 2004, if not longer.
“I’ve been associated with this league for about 40 years and I don’t think it has ever been like this,” Maryland football coach Ralph Friedgen said on the ACC’s weekly teleconference. “The parity in the league is like no other in the country.”
For one of the few times since Florida State joined the conference in 1992, and then Virginia Tech hopped aboard in ’04, the ACC has no dominant team. No squad takes the field and strikes fear into the hearts of opponents, hits late with the authority of the privileged, or can be certain to win. Teams triumph at home, falter on the road. Only Florida State and Miami have a pair of victories to their credit at hostile ACC venues, and both have been beaten at home. (Only Duke does not have at least one road win.)
This state of affairs arguably reflects ongoing ACC mediocrity, given that none of its teams rank in the top 10 in any poll. Still, the enhanced unpredictability and widened sense of possibility are welcome. With the regular season nearly completed -- three contests at most remain on any school's schedule -- half of the ACC's membership has a reasonable chance to make the conference title game on December 6.
“I think the ACC is, parity-wise, probably the most competitive league in the country, top to bottom,” said Gary Stokan, president of the Chick-Fil-A Bowl (formerly the Peach), an event with tie-ins to the ACC and SEC. “I feel assured they’ll get eight bowl-eligible teams and may get nine. That’s great, and speaks to that parity.”
So far, eight of 12 ACC teams have at least six wins each, and all meet the threshold for bowl eligibility. The conference has nine bowl berths reserved, if it has enough teams that qualify. Not every squad with six wins automatically is eligible, a looming problem for Clemson.
BCS teams can count only one win against an opponent from what used to be the Division I-A level. Clemson, Florida State, and Georgia Tech are among five squads nationally that played twice this season against such Football Bowl Subdivision teams. FSU and Georgia Tech have seven wins each, so even discounting one of their FBS victories they’re good. (The Yellow Jackets barely beat Gardner-Webb, an FBS team, a month ago in Atlanta.)
Clemson defeated FBS opponents South Carolina State and The Citadel. That means, at 4-5 overall, the Tigers must sweep their final three games to get to six qualifying wins. This from a team that began the season as the favorite to carry the ACC banner into the thick of the national title hunt, from which the league has been notably absent since expansion. The Tigers host 4-5 Duke at Death Valley this Saturday in a coaching matchup of Alabama alums, then travel to 5-5 Virginia before finishing at home against South Carolina.
All of this lovely parity in ACC football parity may not be a sign of the league’s usual weakness, if you consider Jeff Sagarin’s ratings published weekly in USA Today. Sagarin has a long track record of accurately ranking teams and schedules in college sports, particularly basketball and football. For much of this football season, his power ratings had at least half the ACC’s membership in the top 30.
This week is no exception. Only North Carolina (15) and Miami (19) appear in Sagarin’s top 20, but four more ACC teams make the top 30 (FSU, Wake, Georgia Tech, and Virginia Tech). That matches the Big 12 for the most teams in the top 30. The ACC has an unmatched eight squads in Sagarin’s top 40 (add BC and UVa). N.C. State, 3-6, is the lowest-rated ACC squad at 78. Every other power conference has at least one member with a power rating of 100 or worse.
According to Sagarin, only the Big 12 is stronger overall than the ACC. BCS computer rankings place the ACC third, behind the Big 12 and SEC, which sounds more reasonable.
Chick-Fil-A’s Stokan, who played basketball at N.C. State in the mid-1970s, said the ACC's showing is particularly impressive in light of the newness of its starting quarterbacks (the majority were not starters last season) and head coaches (7 of 12 are in their first or second year at their current school). Given inexperienced leadership, and the overall youth of ACC squads, Stokan said “the league is probably two years from being at the level of the basketball” in national prowess.
And ACC basketball, as we are about to see, is poised to return to a level not reached since the pre-expansion 2003-04 season, when six teams finished in the top 25 and got NCAA bids, and two (Duke and Georgia Tech) reached the Final Four.
