In case you’ve been out of it for the last half-decade or so, the ACC is really, really deep football league these days.
What if every ACC team goes bowling in 2018?
The conference has at least one elite team and very few truly bad teams.
Photo by Brett Carlsen/Getty Images
While picking my way through each game of the season in advance of preseason bowl projections, I noticed I had almost every ACC team right around .500 or better. That’s despite Clemson soaking up tons of wins, at least on the bulletin board, and standout projections for Miami, Florida State, and Virginia Tech — meaning, this doesn’t just look like one big pile of parity.
Vegas win totals for the conference show every team is expected to at least contend for postseason spots, with 10 teams projected at 5.5 wins or better and the two stragglers, North Carolina and Pitt, still within a win each of bowling. (Pitt’s number was updated since that initial list posted.)
So it’d only take couple non-conference upsets or so in order to have enough wins flowing through the ACC to get everybody close to the postseason and have a nice New Year’s Six showing, if nobody falls well short of expectations.
That’s definitely not the outlook in the Big 12 (which has Kansas), Big Ten (Illinois, Rutgers, etc.), Pac-12 (Oregon State), SEC (Ole Miss is already bowl-banned anyway), or any non-power leagues.
Quickly checking power conferences back through 1997, around the time bowl season started adding enough games to make such a feat feasible, reveals a few leagues have come somewhat close to perfect bowl attendance. The Big 12’s been a mere Kansas away before, the 2007 Big Ten was five Minnesota wins short, the 2016 SEC needed a win or two each out of Ole Miss and Missouri, and the 1999 Pac-10 is about the most .500-lookin’ power conference I’ve ever seen. The 2017 ACC was a Cuse and a UNC handful of wins away.
Just some potential 2018 ACC trivia that’d be an interesting achievement for the league everyone used to make fun of.
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