ACC Went 6-4 This Season Against God’s Conference

Some odds and ends to fill the time before the Wolfpack tips against Davidson Saturday and bowl bids are finally settled:

The Big Lead: Head to Head, The ACC Beat the SEC This Year

We all know the Pac-10’s a joke. And everyone thinks the ACC is a joke.

We compiled the season-long stats, and if our math is correct, the ACC won six of the 10 games head-to-head with the SEC this season.

Not so bad for a conference that has been talked down all year across the landscape of college football.  Fact is, the problem with the ACC is one of balance and also the lack of a clear-cut pair of great teams to marquee the conference in the national media.  In other words, the ACC has no football equivalent of basketball’s Duke and Carolina ranked in the top ten year in year out to make the rest of conference look better.  FSU, Miami and Virginia Tech are supposed to be those teams, but they haven’t stood out and have a bad habit of losing to the rest of conference fairly regularly since expansion.

In fact, which conference has the highest rating from statistical guru Jeff Sagarin? The Southeastern?  The Big XII?  The Pac-10?  Nope:

      CONFERENCE          CENTRAL MEAN    SIMPLE AVERAGE  TEAMS

   1  ATLANTIC COAST      (A) =  79.07      78.88  (  1)     12
   2  BIG 12              (A) =  78.37      78.50  (  2)     12
   3  SOUTHEASTERN        (A) =  75.67      76.39  (  3)     12

Interesting. Maybe the sorry ole ACC isn’t so bad in football after all.  Perhaps if the conference had a decent post-season this year, folks would notice.

There’s one place where the ACC can’t compete — at least for now — and that’s in coaches wives.  Up in Knoxville, they’re pretty geeked about Layla Kiffin, who’s married to new Vol helmsman Lane. It’s kind of hard to argue on that point, I’d say. And don’t even try to tell me that if Dawn Bunting’s husband still ran the show in Tar Heel Town things might be different.