As bad as it had been so far this year for the conference, the talk this week was that, besides winning some key OOC games, the ACC had to at least hope that the dregs of it's conference (and I'll stack UVA, Maryland, and Duke up against anyone in terms of a crappy bottom of the barrel of a BCS conference) didn't step up and beat anyone down the stretch. After all, each already had lost to a non-D1A school and Maryland barely scraped by another for their only win. I mean, really putrid stuff.

This week, middling Clemson and UNC needed impressive wins in their respective meetings against these weaklings to establish any amount of cred and Va Tech needed to feed off it's impressive win v Miami by crushing Duke so it could creep back into the National picture.

What happens? UNC and Clemson both lose and Va Tech escapes Durham with a 7pt win.

Nice showing guys. I guess this just proves how deep the conference is?

Oh, and NC St looked like they might be ready to ascend to the top of the league and Wake is down, so of course Wake wins.


What a middling cluster cuff.

Oh and FSU loses to BC.

This is all due to Coach Krzyzewski wanting to keep it a basketball conference.

The irony is that the schools brought in to make it a stronger football conference have been pleasant surprises in hoops and generally failures in football. Only Va Tech has sort of lived up to their end of the deal and that is sort of relative since all they've really done is feast on the abject mediocrity of the conference schedule.

Det - I think you were a bit premature in writing off the ACC my man - ACC has some quality teams, and is probably the most underrated conference at this point. Jeff Sagarin has them at #3 ahead of the BE, Big 10 and Big 12- and I think that is about right.

VTech, GTech, Miami are all quality teams and the middle of the pack teams are starting to showing some life

compared to the Big East, Big 10 and the surprisingly bad football being played in the Big 12 - the ACC isn't looking too shabby

Really? I think we tend to confuse parity with quality.

Miami is a nice surprise but watch a V-Tech game and tell me that they're actually good. They're incapable of executing anything resembling an offense. Yet somehow they win, and mostly because they play in the ACC.

Right now the strongest calling cards for the ACC is VTech's very narrow victory over Nebraska and Miami's equally narrow victory over a down OU team without Bradford. That's it. Well, actually, the single most impressive thing the ACC has done this year is VTech not getting run off the field by Bama.

The big 3 you mention have engaged in a bizarre three-way where every game was completely lopsided which sort of tells me that each has major flaws.

Now, I'm not going to argue that they're worse than the Big East and you know how I feel about the single most overrated conference in football, the Big 10. Hell, since OU is down and TTech has fallen back, I suppose that means the Big 12 is just as bad, if not worse as well. So, in the big picture, I can certainly see your point. It's just that I actually get to watch ACC ball and my local paper covers the hell out of it, so our sins are very apparent to me.

Take last night. You look at the final score FSU 30-UNC 27. Sounds like a great game pitting two quality teams. I mean, somebody has to lose, right? Only it was one team that couldn't do a damned thing right for 2.5 quarters who allowed a team that hadn't been able to move the ball against anyone decent all year to jump out to a 24-6 lead before that team decided to revert to crap themselves and give the game away.

I know ur deep in ACC land, but the thing is parity is everywhere my man, the ACC is not nearly as bad as you think it is.

the reality is the ACC has 3 teams in the top 15 in the BCS, which is more than any other conference besides the SEC, so they are doing something right.......

I hear you. But we seem to get the benefit of the doubt either way. Last year, when nobody was very good and everyone was OK, we sent like 10 teams to bowls because everyone qualified and we got to brag on our depth. This year, when 3 teams are good but can mostly thank the fact that the rest of the conference is abjectly mediocre for the fact that they're all going to have at least 10 wins, and thus rank near the top 10, we get to brag on that.

I just want to see some good ball.

ETA: Correction, last year everyone was not OK. Most of the conference sucked, it's just that, unlike this year, nobody was good enough to run rough-shod through it and give these bad teams the losses they deserved, so everyone was 7-5 thanks to a .500 conference record and the fact that they all played swag OOC.

Well, so much for that.