At the conclusion of the ACC spring meetings Thursday, conference commissioner John Swofford sat in a conference room circled by reporters. He took the opportunity to do a little crowing about his football teams.
He noted that ACC teams have won the past three Orange Bowls, including Georgia Tech on New Year’s Eve. He brought up the ACC’s sweep of its rivalry games with the SEC (Tech-Georgia, Clemson-South Carolina, Florida State-Florida and Louisville-Kentucky), the first time that has happened since 2000. Swofford reminded reporters that Virginia Tech was the only team to defeat eventual national champion Ohio State.
“I really feel good about our football programs and where we are, and the significance of that,” Swofford said.
It wasn’t too many years ago that he acknowledged that his league’s teams needed to win more high-profile nonconference games. However, going into the 2015 season, the ACC appears to ascending, and its members don’t mind sharing the news.
As Clemson coach Dabo Swinney put it, “Y’all used to ask me, ‘When are y’all ever going to beat somebody outside of your conference?’ None of y’all ask me that anymore.”
It is part of a concerted effort, particularly by league coaches, to carry the banner for the conference, as they feel slighted by what they perceive as a media bias toward the SEC. Tech coach Paul Johnson has hardly needed prompting. In a video that went viral, Johnson told an ESPN reporter following the Orange Bowl win over Mississippi State, “And for at least a week or two, we don’t have to hear about the SEC.”
The topic came up this week when Clemson athletic director Dan Radakovich, a member of the College Football Playoff selection committee, and Michael Kelly, the CFP’s chief operating officer, met with ACC coaches for a conversation about the playoff system.
Said Radakovich, “Football coaches, because they watch and they hear from their players and recruits about a lot of the media hype that comes through other conferences, they were just wondering whether that was something that was so prevalent that it altered perceptions.”
Radakovich assured that committee members tried to “take off those conference glasses.”
“You take those out and you say, ‘OK, who are the teams that are playing the best? That’s what we try to get to.”
Not surprisingly, it was not an entirely satisfying meeting. Florida State coach Jimbo Fisher sought an explanation for why his Seminoles were the only team to finish the pre-bowl season undefeated but they ended as the third-ranked team.
Asked if he agreed with the explanation, Fisher responded, “I did not agree with that, but I think they have an extremely tough job.”
That coaches found it necessary to challenge the possible biases of the selection committee speaks to the challenge they feel in receiving a fair look from fans and media compared with the SEC, a league with the largest fan bases, its own ESPN network and credit build up by a string of national championships that ran from 2006 to 2012.
“Perception has a huge part of it because of the human nature of what you hear daily in the paper, in the media, and I think that’s where marketing and branding has to continue to grow,” Fisher said.
Swinney did his best. He ran off a list of accomplishments by conference teams, then took a dig at the hype surrounding the SEC West.
“The Atlantic Division had more draft picks than any division in college football,” Swinney said. “I don’t hear that being written about anywhere. We’re still going to talk about some other division in college football, this mighty division. The fact of the matter is, this league is incredibly strong.”
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