5s for Friday (Updated Sat)

General NCS Football19

In addition to this nice focus on some of the uniform changes in the coming college football season, Dennis Dodd put together an article focusing on some “Top 5s” in college football for the coming season.

There’s obviously nothing earth shattering in the piece…but, I did find it fascinating that four of the five programs that Dodds chooses as “in decline” are from the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Five programs in decline presented by Desperate Housewives

Clemson: Tommy Bowden is way overdue in justifying that $2 million salary. The next big test comes in the Labor Day night opener against Daddy.

Colorado: Dan Hawkins might have jumped the shark going from the WAC to the Big 12. His old program, Boise State, is better.

Florida State: Change coaches all you want, Bobby. It’s still the players, the players, the players.

Miami: A change to native son Randy Shannon gives the ‘Canes hope’ but could Miami have had a worse 2006?

Virginia: George Welsh averaged 7.05 wins over 19 seasons. Al Groh has averaged seven in six. Who is more loved?

Picking programs that have declined in recent years doesn’t seem to be very difficult, does it? One would think that part of the “expertise” part of being a national writer is that Dodd is also trying to pick programs that will continue to decline.

That^ said, I vehemently disagree with Dodd regarding the future of Florida State football. We’ve talked about the re-aligned coaching staff here on SFN.

Lastly, the ACC never seems to get its fair credit when the conference is tough as nails, and this little nugget seems to highlight this issue. After being ranked the most difficult league in America by the unbiased Sagarin computer for two consecutive years, the ACC set the NFL Draft record for first round selections in 2006. How much did we hear about how great the conference was from the media in the middle part of the decade?

A: Not very much.

It’s pretty obvious that the teams in the conference had to be doing pretty damn well if they were high enough to be “programs in decline” today.

Saturday Update
On the other side of the ledger comes Luke Winn’s 5 biggest winners and losers in college basketball’s offseason.

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General NCS Football

19 Responses to 5s for Friday (Updated Sat)

  1. Wulfpack 07/06/2007 at 3:20 PM #

    No disrespect to the Deacs, but Wake Forest won the ACC Championship last year. I don’t know what that means for this year, if anything. But the league was WEAK a year ago. Again, no disrespect intended.

    Miami and FSU have done nothing of note to dispel the notion that there glory days are over.

  2. RedTerror29 07/06/2007 at 3:25 PM #

    Miami and FSU have hit bottom, or will this year. After that, they’re back on the way up.

    Clemson and UVA (and GT) will apparently continue on in mediocrity until the fans get tired enought they force out Welsh and Bowden.

    I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – the only problem with ACC football is coaching. After last year that problem is half fixed. Hopefully this year will see progress on the other half.

  3. Big Worm 07/06/2007 at 4:27 PM #

    Wake Forest winning the ACC was not an indication the conference was weak; it was confirmation that the conference was full of parity and that Wake consistently played with the execution and discipline necessary to rise to the top.

    What you may be trying to say is that there was no elite team in the league last year; that is not the same thing as the conference being “weak.”

  4. westwolf 07/06/2007 at 4:35 PM #

    ^ Good analysis.

  5. Wulfpack 07/06/2007 at 4:35 PM #

    ^No, it was “weak”. That is what I meant to say and I stand by it. Wake has NO business winning an ACC football title, considering the schools that make up the league.

    When Wake, the conference champion, waxes FSU 30-0 but needs to block an extra point to beat Duke, and the ACC Championship game is won 9-6, that = WEAK.

  6. kool k 07/06/2007 at 5:27 PM #

    A Dan Hawkins reference can only mean one thing…

    IT’S DIVISION 1 FOOTBALL!!!

  7. bTHEredterror 07/06/2007 at 5:47 PM #

    Welsh is long gone, I think you mean Al Groh.

    And I think ACC football is under a built in, traditional bias. While there is no disputing the top tradtional powers in our league are in decline, it is more due to the league improving than it is to anything else. Now that FSU and Miami have to take Wake seriously and traveling to NC is more than just a recruiting stop, there is little room for error.

    I’m not so sure the retooled coaching staff will return FSU to what they were. They have struggled to land offensive talent for the past few years years, as has Miami. And UF is rolling along with a fresh Nat’l title. Bobby has entered the Joe Pa phase, meaning he will continue to have an up year here and there, but until he calls it a career and someone else picks up his whistle, they are what they’ll be. Above average, and little more.

  8. choppack1 07/06/2007 at 8:58 PM #

    First off – Grobe is great at a lot of things – finding his kind of players, preparing a game plan, developing his talent and having his guys execute his gameplan…However, game coaching is not one of them.

    It took a blocked FG for them to beat Duke (at home) – they should have lost to the Big 3. 2 years ago in Raleigh, after Mauck was moving the Deacs up and down the field, he went to the more experienced Corey Randolph (I think?) – who failed to move the team in OT in the end zone.

    Wake’s misdirection and execution are awesome – but if you can get it to come down to the game day decisions, I think you’ll be all right. If he has a weakness – it’s the in game decisions.

    As for the rest of this article – if this guy was on top of his game, he would have written this LAST year. He would have hit the nail on the head w/ FSU, Miami, and UVa in decline.

    As for Clemson – I don’t know if they are in decline…TBowden’s career path is much like Sendek’s…He’s proven he can get to a bowl, but hasn’t delivered anything exceptional. Everytime his team starts strong, they finish w/ a whimper. When they stumble out of the gate, they get it together enough to salvage a bowl game. But when Bowden does this every year, you can’t say that they are in decline. (You can also say the same thing about Tech…but since they don’t have the interest that Clemson does, no one notices.)

    Personally, I prefer the hotseat route…This year’s hotseats belong to Groh, Roof, TBowden (who will be on the hotseat every year until he either does something special or has a losing season and is fired) AND Bobby Bowden.

    I don’t think Bobby is fired if things don’t go that well this year. I do think it is used as a nice excuse for him to “retire.” 2 years ago, FSU had a mediocre season, but was bailed out by a shocking ACC championship win and gutsy Orange Bowl performance. Last year, was an unmitigated disaster by Seminole standards. Jimbo Fischer is waiting in the winds and this is the perfect situation for any to step into – for now. Every year FSU waits is another year, they’ll fall farther behind.

    By the way – the ACC was a joke last year. That the worst team in the conference should have beaten the conference champ tells you all you need to know. I don’t take anything from Wake – they deserved the title. But last year, FSU, Miami, UVa, NCState, UNC, and VaTech all had below average years. VaTech came on in towards the end of the season, but they had a very rough start. 5 of those 6 teams are usually pretty good, I would say that last year, only one of the 6 was any good.

  9. 66pack 07/07/2007 at 10:44 AM #

    acc football 2006 was a joke and an embarrassment to anyone who cares about fb

  10. StateFans 07/07/2007 at 11:12 AM #

    ^ I don’t disagree. I just wish that we got our fair level of credit when ACC Football is better. I don’t feel that we do.

  11. highstick 07/07/2007 at 11:47 AM #

    At one time we were on the right track and were developing some consistently good programs in the ACC. For the last 2-3 years, that has not been the case. It’lll take years to overcome that again cause the writers, like Doyel, won’t acknowledge it even if there’s a major turnaround.

    The conference needs some consistently good seasons with some wins over the “major powers” to overcome the issue.

  12. westwolf 07/07/2007 at 2:22 PM #

    ^ I disagree. Writers like DHFF have absolutely no influence on national perception. With a high-profile coach, and one who seems to be univeraly respected, like TOB, if we win 8-9 games this year or next we’ll have all the respect we need.

    Same goes for the conference. The casual fan, like most sports writers today, have very short attention spans and even shorter memories.

  13. pakfanistan 07/07/2007 at 7:04 PM #

    Hang it up. Unless TOB is the second coming of Wallace Wade, there’s no way we’re winning 8 or 9 games this season.

    I hope I have to eat those words.

  14. vtpackfan 07/07/2007 at 10:43 PM #

    Here’s my take on the whole media perception of ACC football. They are just reporting what we already know; this is basketball country. It’s the school’s, the students, and the followers that make the difference in the other BCS football conferences. Not the player’s and not any media bias. We could have more and more great talent spring up in the ACC and go on to play on Sunday’s, maybe even a Heisman hopefull or two, and it won’t make much difference.

    Four private schools, and two touchy-feely liberal art schools make up half of our conference. Look around the country and you see large scale land grant University’s selling out game after game and getting a huge positive following from the supporters year after year.

    Sure it’s a great story what Grobe is doing at WF and how all his practices are open to the public. You don’t hear many stories of the W-S getting mobbed by adoring fans though, do yeah!

  15. choppack1 07/07/2007 at 11:03 PM #

    vtpackfan – that doesn’t exactly explain the Big East’s explosion…

  16. Astral Rain2 07/08/2007 at 3:50 PM #

    Um, Cal has a pretty decent football program- and that place makes liberals cringe.

    USC and Notre Dame have good private school tradition.

    The only point you can make is that the ACC is a basketball conference first and almost always will be. Then again, so is the Big East and maybe Pac 10…

    Fact is, until a North Carolina school wins a national championship, I don’t think the ACC will get much respect.

  17. choppack1 07/08/2007 at 5:05 PM #

    Actually – I think the ACC will get plenty of respect if they can win some big games nationally. The press has a very short memory. To them, we’ve lost the last 2 BCS bowl games, the 2 traditional powers – Miami and FSU – are a shell of their former selves – and VaTech while solid, hasn’t been able to return to their form when they had Vick. (It should be noted that when VaTech won the ACC, they played a very good SEC football and played them well. Still, as we found out w/ OSU playing a very good team tough doesn’t mean diddly. You’ve got to beat them.

  18. vtpackfan 07/08/2007 at 6:56 PM #

    ^Choppack, I think I remember this time last year the media saying that it could be unfair unfair to College football that the Big East was a BCS member. The prevailing thought was that who ever won the UL vs. WVU game got a free ride to the nat’l championship. No one saw the wrecking ball that turned out to be Rutgers. Point is, the media wasn’t too sweet on them last year and that is the point I was trying to illustrate.

    ^Astral, good points. I was making kind of a broad statement. Individual cases like ND, So Cal, and Michigan are not the norm. They have been popular programs since the days Army was normally ranked. They are the exceptions, but not many have followed.

  19. CaptainCraptacular 07/09/2007 at 1:16 PM #

    VT will be carrying the ACC banner this year when the play LSU in Baton Rouge. VT winning that single game gets the ACC a pretty large cache of national ‘ACC is a tough conference’ media respect through at least the end of November. In one fell swoop that would wash away the last 2 years of perceived weakness. Go Hokies.

    VT winning might have the added effect of being yet another nail in Les Miles coffin. The expectations at LSU this year seem to be: reach the BCS title game or the seasons a dissapointment.

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