Thank goodness actual football is starting soon. No offense to the good folks of the Atlantic Coast Conference, but when lawsuits and countersuits are the primary storyline of your offseason, well, you haven’t had a very enjoyable offseason. (I think there’s an “Affidavits and Contracts Conference” joke in here somewhere, but I won’t make it, even though there’s almost nothing Atlantic about this place now.)
Everything about the ACC feels weird right now, from big football programs plotting to leave, to teams from Texas and California joining, to the simple existence of a conference with 17 teams and games like Stanford at Syracuse, Boston College at SMU and Cal at Wake Forest. The variation in schedule strengths — Georgia Tech ranks 15th in projected SP+ SOS, five other teams rank in the top 40, and four others rank outside the top 70 — makes this only loosely feel like a conference. But when the games actually start, we’ll have a potentially stellar race on our hands all the same. Florida State and Clemson, the standout escape plotters (and winners of 12 of the past 13 ACC championships), start out in the front of the race, but five teams are projected between 19th and 32nd in SP+ and loom not far behind.
Let’s preview the ACC!
Every week through the summer, Bill Connelly will preview another FBS conference exclusively for ESPN+, ultimately including all 134 FBS teams. The previews will include 2023 breakdowns, 2024 previews and team-by-team capsules. Here are the MAC, Conference USA, AAC, MWC and Sun Belt previews.
Jump to a section:
2024 projections | Best games
Title contenders | Who’s close?
Hoping for 6-6
2023 recap
Last we saw Florida State, Mike Norvell’s Seminoles were the victim of the College Football Playoff committee’s worst-ever decision and laying the egg of all eggs in the Orange Bowl. It was unfortunate for any number of obvious reasons, but it also just distracted us from the fact that, in the period of just two years, Norvell had transformed the Seminoles from a listless mess to the class of the ACC. They won their first league title in nine years and, despite the Orange Bowl, enjoyed their best finish in SP+ in 10 years.
Elsewhere, Louisville secured its first ACC championship game appearance thanks to a 4-0 record in one-score finishes in conference games, but Jeff Brohm’s Cardinals were among a large batch of similar teams. Including SMU — which, like FSU, dealt with its own late-season QB injury issues — seven current ACC teams finished between 23rd and 40th in SP+. And that doesn’t include a Virginia Tech team that enjoyed a massive midseason turnaround. After starting the season 2-4 and ranking as low as 76th in SP+, Brent Pry’s Hokies won five of their last seven, overachieved projections by an average of 14.7 points per game and charged to 46th. And now they rank in the nation’s top five in returning production.
Meanwhile, the other new additions, Cal and Stanford, were basically West Coast Georgia Tech and West Coast Virginia.
