Sunshine State showdown saved a little face for ACC

By Tony Barnhart | September 9, 2009

Quick question: Who was the happiest man in America late Monday night?

Glad you asked.

That would be John Swofford, the commissioner of the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Because he had the ACC presidents meetings the next day in Boston, Swofford watched Monday night's Florida State-Miami game from his home in Greensboro, N.C. It was a thriller in the old Florida State-Miami tradition as the Hurricanes turned away a late Seminoles drive to win 38-34.

Man, did the ACC really need a game like that.

Why? Because until Monday night the first weekend of the 2009 season, to be charitable, was one the ACC and Swofford would not choose to write home about, and definitely not read about.

"It certainly was not the kind of opening weekend we all would have liked," said Swofford, himself a former quarterback at North Carolina.

No kidding.

How tough a start was it for the ACC? Let us count the ways:

• N.C. State lost 7-3 to South Carolina on Thursday night at home. Russell Wilson, the All-ACC quarterback in 2008, never sniffed the end zone.

• Virginia Tech, considered to be the ACC's best shot at being a national championship contender, was No. 7 when it played No. 5 Alabama in Atlanta. 'Bama dominated the fourth quarter to win 34-24.

• The ACC had not one loss but two to the Colonial Athletic Association. William & Mary stunned Virginia and Richmond beat what was thought to be an improved Duke team.

• Wake Forestwas at home when it lost 24-21 to Baylor and Robert Griffin.

• Maryland, which thought it was headed for a bounce-back year, went to the West Coast and got drilled by California, 52-13.

• During the weekend the ACC had one win against a Division I-A (FBS) opponent, Middle Tennessee State. The rest of the ACC's wins were against Division I-AA teams Northeastern, The Citadel and Jacksonville State.

That's why the ACC needed something good to happen Monday night.

"You have to remember that the same thing [a slow start] happened to us a year ago," Swofford said. "But things turned out pretty well for our league."

The ACC certainly did stumble out of the gate in 2008.

Clemson, a consensus top 10 team in the preseason, opened before a national television audience at the Chick-fil-A Kickoff Game in Atlanta. Alabama didn't just beat Clemson. The Crimson Tide embarrassed the Tigers for all the world to see, 34-10.

Virginia Tech, which would go on to win the league, lost its opener to East Carolina 27-22 on a blocked punt that was returned for a touchdown. Maryland lost 24-14 at Middle Tennessee State in the second week of the season. North Carolina barely got by McNeese State, 35-27. Virginia was at home but got drilled by USC, 52-7.

But from that rough start the ACC went on to send a record 10 teams to bowl games.

"We might not have had a team near the top of the BCS standings, but top to bottom I thought we were the most balanced league in football last season," said Wake Forest coach Jim Grobe, who has a chance to take the Deacons to an unprecedented fourth straight bowl game this season. "The difference between the top team and the bottom team in our league is very small."

"I knew the ACC was going to be tough when we joined [in 2004]," said Virginia Tech coach Frank Beamer, who has won three championships since coming on board. "But it's better from top to bottom than I thought it was going to be."

The ACC can point to its bowl success. It can point to nine of the top 45 choices in the last NFL Draft and 33 total players chosen, which was second only to the SEC (37). Over the past four years the ACC has had 158 players drafted, one behind the SEC. It can point to a lot of things. All are impressive.

But the fact of the matter is that the ACC added Miami, Boston College and Virginia Tech in order to accomplish several things. It wanted to get two teams into the BCS bowls, not only for the money, but for the prestige. It wanted to put on a big-time conference championship game, just like the SEC and Big 12. And most of all, it wanted to get back into the national championship discussion on a regular basis.

At this writing you'd have to charitably say the ACC is not there yet.

The ACC has yet to get two teams in the BCS and the one they do send has usually struggled. The ACC was 1-9 in BCS bowls with eight straight losses until Virginia Tech broke the drought by beating Cincinnati in the Orange Bowl last January.

The conference championship game has really been a mixed bag. There was a sellout for the first one between Florida State and Virginia Tech in Jacksonville in 2005. But after that it has been a tough sell and the game has moved to Tampa for a couple of years. In 2010 it will move to Charlotte, a more central location for the conference footprint and, if the weather is kind, the game should do well there.

But Swofford and all the coaches I talked to concede that the ACC will not be where it wants to be until Florida State and Miami return to prominence (Monday night was a good sign) and the ACC puts itself back into the national championship discussion in late November.

It has been a while. Florida State beat Virginia Tech in the Sugar Bowl to win the 1999 national championship. The following year, Florida State lost to Oklahoma in the BCS title game at the Orange Bowl. Since then the national championship discussion late in the season has been non-existent because the ACC has gotten knocked out early.

There are a number of programs on the rise: Butch Davis built a powerhouse at Miami and many feel he can do it at North Carolina. Paul Johnson shook things up at Georgia Tech by going 9-4 and beating Georgia in his first year. Dabo Swinney has brought new energy to Clemson and believes the Tigers can again be a national program. Despite the loss to South Carolina, Tom O'Brien is a proven coach and will get N.C. State in the mix.

"These things go in cycles and if you look at the coaches in this league and the commitment to football, I don't think there is any doubt that the ACC is going to get there," Davis said.

Would the ACC have been better off staying at nine teams? Swofford had an emphatic no.

"There is simply no question that expansion has been a plus for us," Swofford said. "We were in a competitive marketplace where we had to look down the road and see where the sport was heading. It has been the right thing for us."

When the SEC is getting $3 billion from CBS and ESPN over the next 15 years and the Big Ten is rolling in cash because of its own network, the ACC simply couldn't stand pat and hope to keep its seat at the table with the big boys. So it expanded. The schools have committed hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade facilities. The coaches have much bigger recruiting budgets to go out and get the best players.

The league has done everything it is supposed to do but the most important thing: Win a national championship and prove it can go toe-to-toe with the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12 and Pac-10.

"This league has come so far since we first got in," said Florida State coach Bobby Bowden, whose program joined in 1992. "There was a pretty good gap between us and everybody else for a little while. But now it has closed. Now we've got to get back to the top. I think we'll get there, but it's tough. There is no doubt about that."