2012 ACC Football Previews, From The Bottom To The Top

Can you trend in the right and wrong directions at the same time? If so, it would make sense that Clemson would be the one to figure out how. Consistently one of the more fascinating teams in the country (for reasons good, bad and worse), the Tigers carved out quite a unique path in 2011.

They regressed on paper, from 26th in F/+ to 36th, but improved by 3.5 games, from 6-7 to 10-4.

Generally speaking, numbers are rather conservative creatures. And when you use them to project college football performance, they are even more so. The numbers used for the projections in the Football Outsiders Almanac 2012 are based on precedent. They take a five-year view of a program (because that tends to be more predictive than simply looking at last year), and if a team happens to see the bottom fall out in a given year after a decent run of success, the numbers will assume that at least a marginal recovery is forthcoming.

This actually works quite well in the other direction. If a given team improves too much, too quickly, then regression to the mean is likely. But when things fall apart, progression to the mean is a bit more difficult. (This makes sense: it is much, much easier to get worse than to get better, at least if you believe every football coach, ever.)

Last June, I wrote this about Georgia Tech football:

Then, after a torrid start by both Georgia Tech and its passing offense, I wrote this:

For obvious reasons, Penn State has dominated the Scandal Meter recently. Both the actions and their punishment are rather unprecedented in the college sports landscape.

Nicks’ case was also a reminder of the interesting contradictions in Chapel Hill right now. When Florida State was rumored to be talking to the Big 12 about leaving the ACC, people thought the rationale made sense: as the line went, the ACC is a basketball conference dominated by North Carolina and Duke. Of course, while UNC’s basketball program is all sorts of solid, clearly they make an effort on the football field. If they didn’t, they probably wouldn’t have committed so many violations in search for wins, right? But I digress.

Most of the time, N.C. State head coach Tom O’Brien looks somewhere between grizzled, frazzled and downright miserable. He isn’t as far down that road as Nevada coach Chris Ault, but he’s far enough. That said, he’s earned the right to wear that look in recent years in Raleigh.

Those years have been, to say the least, tumultuous.

A few weeks ago, much of the SB Nation college football team met in New York for both planning and filming a few roundtable discussions. In the first one that was released, SB Nation’s recruiting analyst Bud Elliott named as his “Bold Experiment” Maryland’s attempt to field a team with only 30 scholarship players, to go back to ironman football.

My first response: a chuckle. My second response: “…that was a joke, right?”