The first month of college football is behind us and as Dylan would say, the times they are a changin’. The general theme of the first 30 days of college football was chaos. Rebuilding teams are looking like giants, (Iowa) teams carrying expectations are looking at the least not as solid as they seemed in August (Ole Miss) and at the most like this schedule may not have been such a good idea. (Florida State)

For the boys on the flats the early hype may be lost but the talent we thought we had might sill be there. The Miami Hurricanes in their haste to do away with four years of dominance by the Jackets may have fallen into the Clemson curse of 2006. That year the Yellow Jackets were 5-1 going into Death Valley to face a 6-1 Tiger team who had fumbled the game away in 2004 and failed to convert on fourth down in 2005. The Tigers pulled out all the stops and the purple uniforms for the ESPN cameras and crushed the Jackets 31-7. The loss would be the only ACC loss for the Jackets who went to the conference championship game against Wake Forest, another team the Tigers beat. The Tigers fell on their face losing to Virginia Tech the following Thursday and Maryland the following Saturday. The point being Clemson played that season to beat the Jackets and then lost focus, the same may be said of the Hurricanes when the story of this season has been written.

When the collective powers of the ACC met with Boston College, Miami and Virginia Tech about expanding the conference and then proceeded to carve up the ACC in the most bizarre, money making configuration possible, the football side of the equation was always to have FSU and Miami in the title game. The plan has yet to bear any fruit other than a marquee match-up on Labor Day. This has led to the proposition that the media, the nation and the ACC need FSU and Miami to be good in order to be a top product on the sports market. Not only is this a slap in the face to Virginia Tech who has won three league titles in five years of conference play but other than the “Big East 3” the next newest member of the ACC is Florida State. Florida State does get credit for owning the conference since joining but Miami was a nobody on the college football landscape until 1984, hardly a traditional power. The Hurricanes dominated the 1980’s no doubt with five national titles and a 58 game home winning streak. They took the 90’s off and put up one more championship in 2001 before being hosed by Ohio state. Why would the savior of the ACC be a team whose prime happened in an age of excess and overt showmanship by a team that wasn’t even associated with the conference at the time? The answer of course is because the Hurricanes won, a ton, and at the end of the day everyone loves a winner, especially a team who knows how good they are and can sell the ACC brand. Putting the success of the ACC on a national scale on the shoulders of two teams in Florida is either a slap in the face of the charter members and teams who have carried the banner for a longer period of time, or a stunning survey of the ACC to date.

The sad fact is that the other schools have done nothing to take back their conference from FSU. Maryland and Wake Forest are the only two teams to win outright ACC titles since Florida State joined the conference other than the Hokies. With no team either willing or able to step up and take the reigns of the always wide-open ACC and make a national name for themselves it’s no wonder why the media turns to ratings savvy Miami. The truth is that the conference has not reached the stage where teams expect to go undefeated. No matter what they say confidence wise in the preseason banter you can tell by watching the ACC teams in action that the majority don’t know how to handle an undefeated season and usually find someway to meltdown to an underdog. The problem is not in losing it’s in the relief felt by not being under the spotlight. The ACC has had plenty of one-loss teams but few undefeated teams. Many believe that ONLY Virginia Tech has the chance to represent the conference in the BCS and yet half the teams are one-loss teams, including the Jackets, and no team other than arguably Alabama has looked like a top five team this season. This season is open for the taking and it looks probable that at least one if not both BCS championship contenders will have a mark in the loss column. Is it possible for an ACC team to win out and have a shot at more than the Orange Bowl? Maybe. They’ll have to have confidence, attitude, swagger and a killer instinct. Like that team from the 80’s, who were they again?

III,