What are the five key questions going into the season that need to be asked at ACC football media days?
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ACC Team Previews, 5 Things To Know
Atlantic Boston College | Clemson | Florida State
Louisville | NC State | Syracuse | Wake Forest
Coastal Duke | Georgia Tech | Miami
North Carolina | Pitt | Virginia | Virginia Tech
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ACC Media Days
July 16-18, Charlotte, NC
5. Q: So the ACC isn’t the best conference in football … does it matter?
Ohhhhhhh did the ACC show up all puffy-chested before its 2017 media days.
Everyone had the College Football’s Best Conference talking points down.
Clemson won the national title – looking the part of a superpower about cement its status even more – Lamar Jackson won the Heisman, Florida State was still Florida State, Miami was coming off a nine-win season, Virginia Tech was coming off a ten-win season, and out of the 14 teams in the conference, only Duke, Virginia and Syracuse failed to hit the seven-win mark.
And the coaches? There was Dabo, and Jimbo, and Petrino, and Richt forming the base of a league loaded with excellent head men.
Fast-forward a few seasons, and no, the ACC isn’t the best conference in college football, but … so what?
Conference fans LOVE to get all defensive when it comes to league superiority, and before the days of the College Football Playoff, that mattered. Back in the BCS days and before, perception and preseason rankings meant the world to be a part of that final top two.
Now, win your Power Five conference, go at least 12-1, and unless you’re 2018 Ohio State and get your doors blown off by Purdue, you’ll get into the CFP.
And if you’re Clemson, go 13-0 and be the first or second seed.
Conference superiority only matters if a league is hoping to get in two teams – like the SEC two years ago – but other than that, whatever.
If a second ACC team goes off and finishes 11-1 or 12-1 with its only loss to Clemson, it’ll almost certainly be right there for a top four spot, too, no matter what the rest of the league does. What’s more important is the competitive balance across the conference, and from teams 2-to-14, the ACC has it.
The league is loaded with solid bowl ties, with more coming next season, Look right up and down the 14 program league, and all 14 are coming into the year with reasonable hopes of going bowling – okay, that might be a wee bit of a stretch for North Carolina and Louisville.
Of course all 14 won’t go to a bowl, but there’s probably not going to be a total free-space game in conference play. Duke, Wake Forest, Boston College, Georgia Tech … everyone should be interesting and competitive.
Stick that chest back out, ACC. You’ve got the big cat up top, and parity – in a positive way – among the other 13. Other than Clemson, it’s going to be a wildly unpredictable season again.
But unlike last year, it’ll be because the level of play will be far stronger.
NEXT: What’s really the problem with Florida State?
4. Q: What’s really the problem with Florida State?
Yeah, we already sort of did this question in a way in the 2019 ACC Preview, but it wasn’t all that long ago – just before the 2017 season – that the Seminoles were being hyped as a possible College Football Playoff contender. What happened, and what needs the biggest fix?
Offensive line, offensive line, offensive line.
Of course the quarterback play hasn’t been great – partly due to the problems on the offensive front – and the defense certainly wasn’t its normal killer self, but the first step to getting back to being the Florida State that was a consistent part of the national title chase is to up the consistency on the front five.
The pass protection was a bit iffy before 2017 – giving up 36 sacks in 2016 – but at least the running game worked.
The Noles averaged over five yards per carry three seasons ago, and Cam Akers and Jacques Patrick were solid in 2017, but everything fell off the map last season with just under 1,100 yards on the ground while averaging fewer than three yards per carry.
If Florida State is going to rise back up, the talent has to emerge in a hurry.
On the national championship team of 2013, the Noles had three First Team All-ACC stars, a third-teamer, and Bobby Hart earned Honorable Mention honors.
How about as recently as 2016? Roderick Johnson made the All-ACC First Team, Kareem Are was a second-teamer, and Wilson Bell and Alec Eberle earned Honorable Mention honors.
How many Florida State offensive linemen made any sort of an All-AAC team last year? Zero.
How many Clemson offensive linemen earned All-ACC honors? Five. How about Coastal champion Pitt? Four.
So is this year’s FSU line going to be better? It’s not quite starting over after losing three starters, but the development in fall camp will be among the season’s biggest keys.
NEXT: How quickly can Louisville and North Carolina turn things around?
3. Q: How quickly can Louisville and North Carolina turn things around?
At the very least, they’re both going to be better – how can they just as bad? – even if they’re not battling for the ACC title quite yet.
North Carolina might be 5-18 over the last two years, but at least it’s loaded with veterans to go along with a good quarterback recruit in Sam Howell to build around. The talent level isn’t special, and it’s still going to take some work, but Mack Brown isn’t opening an empty cupboard.
Even with all of the defensive issues and offensive inconsistencies in a 2-9 season, the Tar Heels were competitive at times, with five losses decided by a touchdown or less.
The biggest blowouts were to Miami and … East Carolina. There will be a few of those, and the schedule isn’t a breeze, but Vegas has UNC’s win total at 5.5 – the expectations are there to improve fast. The problem? All 11 FBS teams on the schedule went bowling last season – Mercer is the other.
Even a five-win season would be a fantastic step back up.
Louisville would take that, too.
Without Lamar Jackson around, the offense fizzled with just 237 points on the year – the offensive line was awful – but the defense was the much, much bigger issue. On the plus side, all of the problems in last year’s disaster led to landing Scott Satterfield – and there’s your instant difference-maker.
The Cardinals might not have been able to hire Jeff Brohm, but Satterfield isn’t a consolation prize. At Appalachian State, his Mountaineers finished sixth in the nation in total defense and fourth in scoring D, and he gets seven starters back on D.
The ACC isn’t the Sun Belt, it’s going to be a process, and Vegas likes the Cardinals at 3.5 wins, but considering the program had eight straight winning seasons before last year, 2018 might have been nothing more than an ugly aberration.
NEXT: Where are the quarterbacks?
2. Q: Where are the quarterbacks?
Duke’s Daniel Jones is off getting booed by New York Giant fans, NC State’s Ryan Finley is a Cincinnati Bengal, and Florida State’s Deondre Francois is now a looking for another college team to play for – probably in the FCS.
There are your top three ACC passers last season in yards per game.
Syracuse’s Eric Dungey is done, North Carolina’s Nathan Elliott is a grad assistant at Arkansas State, and it would’ve been a wonderful luxury if Kelly Bryant or Hunter Johnson were backing up Trevor Lawrence instead of being long, long gone to Missouri and Northwestern, respectively.
Go back to just two years ago, and the ACC was loaded with NFL quarterback talent with Deshaun Watson, Lamar Jackson, Mitchell Trubisky, Daniel Jones, Finley, and don’t scoff, Nathan Peterman. That doesn’t include Francois, Dungey, and Brady Kaaya, who was fifth in the ACC in passing in 2016.
This year? If you’re looking for the difference between the ACC’s stars and the also-rans, it might be as easy as the respective quarterback situations.
Clemson is obviously more than Lawrence, but it doesn’t hurt to have the guy who’d have been the No. 1 overall pick in this year’s NFL Draft – if he could’ve left early.
Virginia has several terrific parts on both sides of the ball, too, but it’s going to be right there in the mix for the Coastal title partly because of the fabulous Bryce Perkins under center.
No one else in the ACC has a truly awful quarterback situation, and some teams like Pitt (Kenny Pickett), Boston College (Anthony Brown), Sam Hartman (Wake Forest) and Virginia Tech (Ryan Willis) have good veterans, but the league’s overall star power is missing – at least at the moment.
Of course, that could quickly change, but there are a whole slew of question marks going into the season.
How quickly can the quarterback play improve at Miami, Florida State and Louisville? How will Georgia Tech adjust with the new style? How quickly will Tommy DeVito (Syracuse), Sam Howell (North Carolina), and Matt McKay (NC State) get up to speed?
In a league with so many strong teams and so much parity, name the teams that will get the top quarterback play – again, outside of Clemson and Virginia, and go ahead and throw Virginia Tech in there – and you probably have the contenders.
NEXT: Does anyone other than Clemson have a shot at winning the ACC?
1. Q: Does anyone other than Clemson have a shot at winning the ACC?
No conference has a bigger slam-dunk favorite to win league championship than the ACC.
Oklahoma? Nah, Texas could certainly win the Big 12.
Ohio State? Not this year considering all the big changes and with a nasty Big Ten East to deal with.
Alabama? It would hardly be stunning if Georgia, or LSU, or even Florida ended up winning the SEC Championship.
UCF? Okay, but Houston is looking like a potential killer, and the Knight quarterback situation is now down to Notre Dame transfer Brandon Wimbush.
If you’re picking anyone but Clemson to win the ACC, you’re just trying to be wacky. There’s no rational reason to think anyone else can do it.
But let’s say it happens. Let’s say it’s Sunday, December 8th, and we’re all asking, “how did (insert team other than Clemson here) pull it off?”
Of course the Coastal champion could come up with a Buster Douglas on the right day and beat Clemson with a great performance, but what would have to go wrong for the Tigers?
Could there be a wave of entitlement and overconfidence? Dabo Swinney has been great at keeping the motivation high, and considering all the new parts on the defensive line mixed with the young talent in the other spots – especially the NFL talents in a salary drive – there shouldn’t be any issues keeping everyone focused and fired up.
The schedule? Nope – not an issue. ACC fans get their undies in a twist when this gets suggested, but there’s obviously a difference between dealing with the weekly SEC and Big Ten East slates and playing at North Carolina, Florida State, at Louisville, and Boston College in the middle of the season.
That’s not to say Clemson wouldn’t or couldn’t win the SEC or Big Ten, but when your toughest conference game is either at Syracuse or at NC State – there’s no Miami, Virginia, or Virginia Tech to deal with in the regular season – you’ll take it.
Injuries? There’s the one big concern. Chase Brice came through against Syracuse last season, but there’s obviously a massive drop-off if Trevor Lawrence is out for any length of time, or in the ACC Championship. The depth at the skill spots and talent in the defensive back seven are there, but it’ll be a problem if the lines suffer a slew of major bumps and bruises.
It’s going to take something extraordinary.
For Clemson to not make it five in a row, it’s going to have to take either a total regular season collapse – and by that, meaning lose two conference games – or, again, go back to the right-day-right-team thing of facing someone who has everything clicking in the ACC title game.
Miami has the killer linebacking corps, the potential, the motivational defensive head coach in Manny Diaz, and the overall D to be more than just a speed bump if it gets back to Charlotte for the second time in three years.
Virginia has the make-up, coaching and starting 22 to hang with anyone in the country if everything is clicking. This should be the Coastal favorite, and in a curveball sort of way, this might be the one team Clemson would least want to deal with.
Can Virginia Tech flip the switch after a bit of a rebuilding season? The 2016 team gave the eventual national champion a push in a 42-35 Clemson ACC Championship win. And maybe …
Nah. Clemson is going to win another ACC title.
ACC Team Previews, 5 Things To Know
Atlantic Boston College | Clemson | Florida State
Louisville | NC State | Syracuse | Wake Forest
Coastal Duke | Georgia Tech | Miami
North Carolina | Pitt | Virginia | Virginia Tech
