There’s a hope among Clemson football fans that the Tigers might be given the benefit of the doubt if they were to drop their Week 1 game against the Georgia Bulldogs.
If the Tigers go 12-1 and win the ACC, there is certainly reason to believe that they’ll still be able to make the CFB Playoff but the perception of the conference has already taken a big hit and we’re only in the first week of the season.
For the ACC to take a step forward in the eyes of the committee and national analysts, the conference needed two program, in particular, to step up. Neither did so.
The North Carolina Tar Heels, who started out the year ranked No. 10 in the nation in the AP Poll, were beaten by an unranked Virginia Tech team on the road and the offense looked atrocious in the outing. UNC, led by a supposed Heisman contender in QB Sam Howell, only mustered 10 points and the narrative surrounding them after this first week is that they were strongly overrated.
The only other team in the ACC ranked inside the preseason top-25 was Miami, who was ranked No. 14 coming into the season. While we all knew that the Hurricanes were overrated and that they weren’t going to beat Alabama, the hope as far as the ACC’s perception was that they could at least keep things interesting and potentially only lose by a couple of scores. Instead, they were– and still are at the time of this writing– taken behind the woodshed for the entirety of the afternoon.
The ACC, again, is Clemson football and then no one else
Say what you want to, but the 2021 Clemson football schedule is going to face major scrutiny over the course of this season.
After Georgia, the Tigers may not play another ranked team the entire regular season and even if NC State or Boston College were to sneak inside the top-25, let’s not pretend that those wins are going to be looked at as elite wins by the committee.
The hope was that Clemson might have a ranked win in the regular season and then the Tigers might be able to beat a top-10 team in the ACC Championship game– most likely UNC– to balance out a loss, if it were to happen, against the Bulldogs.
Instead, it’s looking much more like the ‘mulligan’ might not be in play as much as we would like.
Maybe we’re wrong. UNC might still be a top-15 or top-10 team. Maybe Virginia Tech proves to be better than we all thought. Maybe NC State and Boston College do prove to be formidable teams.
No one is saying here that Clemson will be eliminated with a loss, but what we are saying is that the Tigers need to take care of business if they want to control their own destiny. Because, frankly, the ACC isn’t going to do them any favors.