Role as caboose not all bad for ACC football
Jan 3, 2009
The unprecedented 10 teams in bowl games didn’t do it. The victory in a BCS bowl, the first for a league member in nine years, didn’t do it. Heightened internal competitiveness, the rise in interest and achievement among Triangle members, didn’t do it. Any and all public relations campaigns touting the quality of the on-field product didn’t do it.
Try as it might, the ACC did little in 2008 to shake the popular notion it is a caboose, not an engine, on the train of college football.
“The ACC is down there with the Big East,” Lee Corso, the TV football analyst, said after the leagues concluded their bowl efforts. “The ACC and the Big East are battling for last place.” Corso gave the ACC a slight edge, although during the regular season the two conferences split their four games and the Big East won two of three bowl encounters. The key postseason exception was the Orange Bowl, won 20-7 by Virginia Tech over Cincinnati in a Jan. 1 battle of ACC and Big East champions.
The ACC commands so little respect, Clemson was the only league program that cracked the AP top 10 at all during the ’08 season. The Tigers’ lofty standing evaporated as soon as they played a game.
The ACC was a middling 4-6 in bowl competition this postseason. Over the past two years combined, the bowl record is 6-12, which translates to a pair of defeats for every victory against opponents with at least as many wins as losses. That is not a promising trend, especially for a league that went through massive contortions to enhance its football prowess.
This bowl season, the ACC was 0-4 against the game’s most powerful conferences: Two defeats courtesy of schools from the SEC (Vanderbilt over Boston College, LSU over Georgia Tech), with single losses to members of the Big 12 (Nebraska beat Clemson) and Pac-10 (Cal edged Miami). The wins came against Navy (Wake Forest), Wisconsin of the Big 10 (Florida State), Nevada (Maryland) and Cincinnati.
“I think the best thing you can say about the ACC was, they weren’t really good but they were really balanced,” said Tony Barnhart, a sports writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution who also covers college football for CBS. “There wasn’t that much difference from the top of the league to the bottom of the league.”
For the ACC to improve its status nationally, both Barnhart and Corso, a Florida State graduate, delivered the same prescription. “As long as Florida State and Miami are not playing on January first, the league is down,” Corso said. “The league is not a very good public-perception league, and the reason is they don’t have a Florida State or a Miami battling for the title.”
Barnhart said the ACC has suffered in comparison with other leagues because “they don’t have the dominant teams that make you say, ‘Wow!’” Reflecting the ACC’s status, Georgia Tech was the highest-rated conference member at No. 14 in the final AP poll.
Virginia Tech is the only ACC program that’s been ranked every year since 2004; the Hokies secured all but one of the league’s top-10 finishes during that span. (BC in 2007 was 10th in the final AP poll, one spot behind Virginia Tech.)
Barnhart described the ACC as “still a finesse league” that cannot compare to conferences like the SEC in the mix of athleticism and size on its offensive and defensive lines. Certainly Georgia Tech got a taste of that difference in a rout by LSU, a middling SEC squad that did not get a vote in the final AP poll. Tigers’ coach Les Miles showed a keen sense of sportsmanship in capping the Yellow Jackets’ embarrassment at the Georgia Dome by faking a kick to gain a first down late in the game, his team already ahead by more than four touchdowns.
The ACC “got that BCS monkey off their back” with Virginia Tech’s Orange Bowl win, Barnhart said. He saw the next step in improving the league’s reputation as producing teams that figure in the national championship discussion, including a pair worthy of BCS bowl berths during the same season. Since the current postseason arrangement was set, the ACC has never sent two teams to lucrative, high-prestige BCS bowls in the same year.
Frankly, though, the ACC makes a mistake in relying too heavily on a few schools, particularly Florida State and Miami, to elevate its standing in college football. The wait for the former giants to regain and maintain their prominence may be a long one.
There’s mixed evidence regarding Randy Shannon’s ability to resuscitate the Hurricanes. His combined record in two years at Miami, his only two seasons as a head coach, is 12-13. He just fired offensive coordinator Patrick Nix and parted ways with quarterback Robert Marve, assuring a revamp and further adjustments for what’s been a middling attack.
Meanwhile FSU remains hitched to elderly Bobby Bowden, now one career victory behind Penn State’s Joe Paterno (383-382). Florida State finished 9-4, its best showing since 2004, and should be favored next year in the ACC’s Atlantic Division. But FSU grew to a national power under one man, Bowden, and there’s no guarantee his former success can be duplicated at Tallahassee, especially by successor-in-waiting Jimbo Fisher, who has never been a head coach.
Don’t be sold false hope. ACC football has rarely rated well on the national level, not even when the league added a Florida State program at the height of its prowess. Between 1992 and 2000, FSU won two national titles, annually made the AP top 10, and won or shared the ACC title every year. Yet the conference was denigrated because Bowden’s clubs went 70-2 in league competition. During those nine seasons, only three other ACC squads finished in the top 10.
These days, most ACC games are competitive, a distinct improvement. No team finished with more than nine regular season victories in 2008, none with fewer than four. Only Duke and Virginia had losing records prior to postseason.
Rather than await the indefinite re-emergence of name-brand programs to secure respect, ACC football should emulate basketball and immediately celebrate its uncommon balance. High aspirations are important, but so is taking pride in what you are, even if that’s simply the best caboose on the track.
