The ACC’s gone from being the Power 6/5’s “basketball conference” to being 2016’s best football league, having two national champions in four years, setting a new conference bowl season record (9-3), winning the Heisman and the Piesman, potentially having three or four top-10 NFL draft picks, and so forth.
3 ACC teams each had at least as many SEC wins as Ole Miss or Mizzou did
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So fun facts like the one in the headline will probably continue for a while.
| 2016 SEC wins | ||||
| Clemson* | Florida State* | Georgia Tech* | Missouri | Ole Miss |
| at Auburn, 19-13 | Ole Miss, 45-34 | Vanderbilt, 38-7 | Vanderbilt, 26-17 | Georgia, 45-14 |
| South Carolina, 56-7 | Florida, 31-13 | at Georgia, 28-27 | Arkansas, 28-24 | at Texas A&M, 29-28 |
| Alabama, 35-31 | Kentucky, 33-18 | |||
| * Not currently an SEC team | ||||
Ole Miss entered 2016 as the AP Poll’s No. 11, then lost to the ACC’s Florida State. The Rebels held onto the noble titles of Best Two-Loss Team In The Country, Best Three-Loss Team In The Country, and so forth, eventually finding themselves down to promising freshman QB Shea Patterson after an injury to Chad Kelly. Mizzou was just bad.
Clemson also beat both of its fellow SEC conquerors, so let’s go ahead and count the Tigers as 5-0 in the SEC this year. Who’s gonna stop us?
All three of these ACC schools have associations with the SEC. Each plays an in-state SEC rival to close the regular season, FSU considered SEC membership in the early 1990s, Clemson was rumored (emphasis on rumored) to be a potential SEC consideration a few years ago, and Tech was a member until 1963.
This could continue, too. Next year, in addition to state rivalries, the national champ hosts Auburn, FSU plays Bama in what’ll surely be Week 1’s biggest game, and ... Paul Johnson can fill you in on GT’s schedule:
"We’re 3-0 in the SEC East and have Tennessee next." - @GTPaulJohnson
— GeorgiaTech Football (@GeorgiaTechFB) December 31, 2016
Elsewhere!
Fake News Facebook struck the title game, as a random South Carolina family was accused by desperate sports fans of rigging Bama-Clemson.
Watching Nick Saban and Dabo Swinney spend two minutes tracking each other down through the postgame scrum is pretty cool.
Justin Wilcox could be Cal’s new head coach. I voted for him as defensive coordinator of the year after Wisconsin produced a top-five defense without what we’d call top-five talent.
Texas hired a former pro-Briles staffer, disturbing Horns fans who’d long been vocal about Baylor.
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