Clemson football: Raleigh analyst picks UNC to win ACC Championship

The Clemson football team will be favored for yet another season to win the ACC Championship and it shouldn’t come as a surprise.

The Tigers have absolutely dominated the ACC over more than the last half-decade, winning six-straight ACC titles and earning six CFB Playoff berths as a result.

What’s most impressive is simply how dominant Clemson has been. In the past six seasons, the Tigers have gone 47-3 against ACC competition- with one of those losses being to Notre Dame in its only season as an ACC team last season- and they’ve outscored opponents in the last six ACC Championship games by a score of 229-112. That’s an average win margin of 19.5 points.

One Raleigh analyst is going out on a limb and predicting against Clemson football

WRAL’s Joe Giglio said he is tired of seeing Clemson win the ACC Championship year-after-year and that there are teams in the conference that could potentially challenge the Tigers this season.

He says that Miami could be a surprise contender, but focuses in on two teams- N.C. State and North Carolina- as the two who will down Clemson’s hope of a seven-peat in the ACC.

Giglio says he believes the Wolfpack could find a way to beat the Tigers this season, but that they’ll lose to Boston College. That will lead to a Clemson-UNC ACC Championship game and his bold prediction is that the Tar Heels will come out of Charlotte victorious.

While there’s no doubt that Sam Howell is a talented quarterback and that Mack Brown has begun to built a nice program up in Chapel Hill, that seems like more blind hope than honest reason.

Giglio says Clemson may take a step back after losing Trevor Lawrence, but those are some of the same things we heard when the Tigers lost Deshaun Watson. Also, you have to know who’s replacing him.

Behind Lawrence is D.J. Uiagalelei, who many believe has the potential to be the best to play the quarterback position in Clemson football history. The Tigers also return an experienced defense and they have some of the best players in the conference.

Could they be upset along the way or get beat by UNC? Sure, anything can happen. But we’d say we like our chances in picking the Tigers to do what they always do and run through the ACC as normal on their way to a seventh-straight conference title.