Consider this résumé for a moment:
Conference X has a team in the College Football Playoff again.
It finished with three teams ranked in the selection committee’s top 10, tied for the most of any league.
Its past three champions have finished the regular season unbeaten.
Twelve of its 14 head coaches have at least one 10-win season in their respective careers.
This looks like a mighty fine football conference, doesn’t it? Indeed, the ACC has made some serious strides toward beefing up its football brand over the past three years. After going more than a decade between fielding serious national championship contenders, the ACC saw Florida State win it all in 2013 and make the playoff in 2014. Now Clemson has taken up the baton, earning the top overall seed in this season's playoff.
Given these plain, unfiltered facts, perceptions should be shifting about the ACC as a football conference.
“If you haven’t changed your mind at this point, you’re not paying attention or you don’t understand college football, one of the two,” commissioner John Swofford told ESPN.com. “I understand that perception sometimes lags a little bit behind reality, but after three years of it, it’s time for that perception to be there. But you have to continue to earn it. That’s what great conferences do in any respective sport, so the more years you have of that and the more consistency you have with it, the more the perception changes.”
While some might say the ACC is not as strong collectively this season because it failed to fill all its bowl slots and had five teams finish with losing records for the first time since 2009, it is hard to argue with the strength at the top. Interestingly, many have praised the Big Ten for having a bounce-back year because it has performed well at the top, joining the ACC with three teams ranked in the top 10. But nobody has really said the same about the ACC, which finished the regular season with the only unbeaten team in the country for the third straight season.
The difference is the Big Ten has other teams in the top 25. Remember, conferences are judged not only by their elite teams but by their middle class. This is where the ACC has struggled for quite some time. But this year definitely qualifies as progress, especially since it has taken so long for the league to develop its elite programs. Florida State and Clemson might be waving the banner for the ACC right now, but it is no different in the Big Ten, where Ohio State has led the charge, and the SEC, where Alabama is a perennial top-five team.
This is also a league that has gone 7-1 against its SEC rivals over the past two years on the final weekend of the regular season.
“A few years back, we talked about winning the right kinds of games to earn the respect, and it’s been all about earning it,” Swofford said. “Our teams have gone out and done that within the regular season as well as the postseason over the last three years. When you couple that with a lot of high-profile, nonconference wins over the last three seasons, I think we’re on a path that we have wanted to be on and we’ve developed that consistency and I think that’s how you earn the respect nationally as a conference. Our champion, our best team, has done extremely well, but we’ve got a number of teams that have done really well, too, and when you finish the regular season with three teams in the top 10, I think any conference commissioner would be very pleased with that.”
Now add in the coaching hires the ACC has made over the past several weeks, and it could be only a matter of time before the middle class is more defined. The Coastal Division has been completely revamped, with Mark Richt, Justin Fuente and Bronco Mendenhall coming aboard. Including Dino Babers at Syracuse, every new coach comes complete with noteworthy, and praiseworthy, accomplishments. Couple these developments with the results on the field, and it appears this is a conference focused on strengthening its brand.
“The commitment has been there for a while, but it’s becoming more and more obvious that in this league, everything is elevated if you want to compete for the championship,” Swofford said. “I don’t know a single school in our league that does not want to do that. When you couple the new hires with those already in our league, it’s an extraordinary group of football coaches, probably the strongest that I’ve ever seen in the history of this league at one time. You have to have quality leadership in order to compete nationally and to compete for ACC championships and national championships and to rebuild programs. Collectively we certainly have that in our league at this point.”