2015 ACC football previews, team by team! Follow along!

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This is my fifth year writing this offseason preview series. This six-month ritual becomes like a road trip; you end up with benchmarks, be they go-to rest stops or this part of the Penna Turnpike where there’s always construction. Once you hit a benchmark, you know how much of the trip you have left, down to the minute.

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This is how it’s supposed to work. You shift around the pieces in your first year, and you maybe take a slight step backward. Then, in your second year, you take a definitive step forward.

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Ignore the name on the helmet for a moment.

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At a school with less of a history, Al Golden would be on track.

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According to Sports Reference’s SRS measure, Frank Beamer has been in charge of 12 of Virginia Tech’s 13 best-ever teams.

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A 6’1, 177-pound walk-on from Pelham, Ala., Dabo Swinney earned a scholarship at Alabama and caught seven passes for 81 yards in three years. In his junior and senior seasons, Alabama went 24-1, finished in the top five twice, won the first SEC title game, and whipped Miami for the 1992 national title, and he carved out an unexpected niche.

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The coaching profession requires a set of skills so diverse that no human being is capable of being good at everything. You are one part politician, one part tactician, one part car salesman, one part player talent scout, one part coach talent scout, and about three parts chief executive officer. The best coaches are good at a lot, but not even a Nick Saban or Urban Meyer is good at everything.

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As college football fans, we find glory in the smaller moments. This is the most beautifully strange American sport; of that, there is no question.

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Let’s be honest: if Florida State’s improbable 13-0 start had happened to a different team, it would have been a thrill.

At the end of each conference run-through (here’s the whole ACC), I look at how I perceive the conference’s balance of power heading into 2015. This is in no way based on schedules. These are not predictions. They’re just how I would rank the teams after writing thousands of words about each.

For a while, the ACC race has broken down into two narratives. The winner of the Coastal Division emerges from a battle royale of clearly flawed competitors, while the winner of Clemson-Florida State wins the Atlantic. The Coastal winner has had at least two conference losses for three straight years, while the Tigers-Noles victor has taken the last six Atlantic crowns.

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When a program falls apart, it happens suddenly. The bottom drops out for a coach, and then he’s let go, and in a significant collapse, the next coach bottoms out as well.

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On paper, this was a dynamite coaching performance.

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Building a program happens in cycles. You struggle at first, then break through with a experienced talent. Then that talent leaves. Every roster churn provides an opportunity to either improve further or regress toward what you inherited.

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Wake Forest went 3-9 last season, ranked 101st in the F/+ ratings (behind Texas State, FIU, FAU, UL-Monroe, Kansas, and head coach Dave Clawson’s former team, Bowling Green), and scored an almost impossibly low 178 points. It was the Demon Deacons’ worst point total since 1996. Wake wasted a strong defense with one of the worst offenses in recent history (they scored 13 or fewer points in a game six times and never topped 24), and furthered the tumbling that marked the last half-decade of the Jim Grobe era.