The Future of the ACC

When Virginia Tech, Miami and Boston College joined the ACC, people cried out about that watering down the basketball league with the football powers. And five years later, a funny thing has happened. The basketball hasn’t been watered down at all (all three have made NCAA tournament appearances). But the football seems to be suffering.

Last year the ACC got slammed for its performance throughout the year, with no real dominant team and a lot of mediocre ones. I always defended the conference, but it became clear to me with two games last week that most pundits are right. In Virginia Tech’s loss to Alabama and NC State’s loss to South Carolina, it was clear in both games that the SEC team was better. Using the SEC as an example might be skewed, because it is in my opinion the best league. But losing home games to teams like William and Mary, Richmond and Baylor is not going to get it done. Part of being able to recruit comes from respect, both as a team and a conference. And the ACC teams need to start bringing it. It’s great that they have really competitive games within the conference like Miami vs. FSU and GT vs. Clemson in the last week. But they need to win these out-of-conference games against other Division I teams. Here are a look at this week’s games against other FBS schools:

Duke at Army
UNC at Uconn
Stanford at Wake Forest
Marshall at VT
Kent State at BC
TCU at Virginia

The ACC needs to go at least 5-1 in these games to salvage some respectability back.